Conveners
Rail Imaginations: Weaving Tracks of Transformative Thought
- Hugo Pereira (NOVA School of Science and Technology - CIUHCT)
Description
This panel searches for new narratives to broaden our view of the human imagination and its possibilities through values, worldviews and beliefs, diverse and pluralistic imaginaries. It premises itself on the assertion that to optimise planning of future transport solutions, transport history needs to be understood.
We are especially interested in revisiting twentieth century railway imaginations. Much work on railways is either on the nineteenth-century origins and growth or else on our own era. The twentieth century is a sort of long second age in which the railways were challenged by the automobile and flight, ramping up the pressure on the planet towards where we are now climate-wise. These decades have witnessed a de-romanticisation of rail travel within contemporary mobility imaginaries, despite the railways being recognised as amongst the lowest-carbon, greenest modes of long-distance travel. Compared to the lure of space-time compression offered by air travel and the romance of autonomy and flexibility served up by car use, railway travel is likely to be seen as something more fixed, tied to matters such as the timetable or the budgets of state and private operators. The panel brings together sites, imaginations and methodologies that resist the more monolithic, techno-formal and insular conceptualisations of the railway, and emphasise it as a constitutive site that nurtures collective experiences, uniquely enables an engagement with political and geographical peripheries, and concretely offers modes of public care and resilience. By exploring railway genesis, routes and labour, and forms of collective life, social interaction and meaning-making, we intend to reinvigorate affective engagements with the railway and evaluate priorities for resilient rail futures. Some of the core panel themes/questions are:
1. How is human railway experience rewritten when the twentieth century seen across national and continental boundaries in a non-hierarchical way becomes the focus?
2. What does this new history of the railways bring to mobility studies?
3. How would this understanding contribute to critical debates and contestations in the twenty-first century, especially those related to climate change, equitable transport and contemporary social worlds?
The panel showcases early-stage work towards subprojects within the 2024–2027 research project ‘Twentieth-Century Railway Imaginations: Building the Mobility and Infrastructural Humanities’ (acronym: RAILIMAGE), supported by the H.W. Donner Funds and based in the department of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University.
Black Americans in the period labelled the First Great Migration (c. 1910--40), when car travel was financially less accessible than later and often fraught with danger for Black motorists, most often established larger-scale imaginations of the nation they were citizens of through long train journeys. Accounts of such mobilities build on the personal narratives of long-distance journeys which...
The research studies the railway net as a postcolonial agent in terms of reshaping the Central Asian space. The author questioned whether the railways still have the colonial or imperial agenda, or it was reimagined by the national states after 1991 and now the Central Asian railways are bearers of a new agenda. To analyse the changes in railways as the instrument of shaping the territories,...
Through the figure of the stationmaster, this paper explores the complex embodiment of the system within a role/character; and how it helps us think relationally about the co-constitution of human agency and technicity in the production of infrastructure as technosocial worlds, as public good and as sites of care. With an empirical focus on the postcolonial railway in India, the paper combines...
The late Ottoman-era Hejaz Railway project, connecting Damascus to Medina, stands as a testament to the power of collective financing with its extensive mobilization fuelled by individual donations. The current work aims to explore this phenomenon and open a historical window into discussions on social/solidarity economy by addressing the challenges of scaling up such efforts. To do so, the...
