Mobility Humanities

This paper examines the sociotechnical imaginaries underpinning the "smart airport," showing how visions of seamless, data-driven dfficiency obscure the laborious human practices that sustain them. Through a discourse analysis of aviation industry marketing materials, contrasted with observations at "SmartAirport," the study reveals how datafication-the conversion of social, material, and environmental processes into machine-readable data-reconfigures labour, power, and mobility within technocapitalist frameworks. While industry narratives frame data as a panacea for operational challenges-depicting it as an omniscient, predictive force promising autonomous, frictionless perations via centralised dashboards and digital twins-this paper exposes the tedium and contingency of datafication in practice. These systems rely on constant human intervention, including calibrating sensors, correcting algorithmic errors, filling data gaps, and maintaining complex infrastructures. By contrasting the aspirational discourse with on-the-ground realities, the paper highlights the paradoxes of datafication: While it promises supra-human efficiency, it intensifies and redistributes labour rather than eliminating it. The study contributes to critical geographies of automation and datafication by emphasising the indispensable role of human work in supposedly autonomous systems and challenging deterministic narratives of technological progress.