Mobility Humanities

Vol. 5 No. 1, January 2026

We are pleased to announce that Mobility Humanities (5.1) is now available at our website. This issue features nine articles, an interview with Brenda S.A. Yeoh, as well as a book review. It also includes a Special Issue section on “Aspirations of Flight,” guest-edited by Weiqiang Lin and Benjamin Linder.스크린샷 2026 01 27 104333

Mobility Humanities 오픈그래프 이미지

Encounters in Motion: Being Present with Others in Long Duration Train Travel

DOI.
Special Issue
By.
Lauren Wagner
Pages.
45 - 75
Date.
31. Jul. 2024

Abstract

This paper presents some auto-ethnographic experiments in the embodied, affective and material encounters enabled by being in transit over land for longer than 24 hours. As a form of travel that is increasingly available in some places and increasing marginal elsewhere, long-distance overland travel offers a different perspective to passengering. Like others who have investigated shared spaces of transit like commuter trains and aeromobilites, this paper explores what happens when people are stuck together, moving with each other while simultaneously skimming along a surface. Taking these as sites of encounter—where bodies, technologies and social and material infrastructures are coming into contact with each other, while shaped by human circadian needs—I explore how interactions and encounters are enabled by the persistent co-presence of being trapped together over long-distances of transit. In particular, I focus on how different forms of shared proximities and distances manifest through both interactions and civil inattention that occur between both passengers inside and the passing world outside.
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