Micropolitics of Mobility: Public Transport Commuting and Everyday Encounters with Forces of Enablement and Constraint

Politics in geographical research on mobilities evaluates the nature of power and control of mobility and considers how people are differently enabled and constrained by these processes. Politics is usually approached along subject-centered lines where the task is to identify who is enabled and who is constrained and subsequently to account for the hidden mechanisms of power behind this unevenness. This article argues that what these subject-centered analyses can risk underplaying are the very transformations that mobility practices such as commuting themselves actually give rise to. This article draws on qualitative fieldwork during an evening train commute between Sydney and Wollongong in Australia to argue that the politics of mobilities needs to attend to ongoing processes of “micropolitical” transformation that take place through events and encounters, changing relations of enablement and constraint in the process. My argument is that we need to expand our understanding of what constitutes mobility politics to understand the nature and reach of the multiple forces that are at play, affecting and transforming life in this zone. This potentially enables us to more sensitively evaluate questions of responsibility and intervention.