Institute for advanced studies - IAS
14.06.2018
Weiqiang Lin is Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, invited by the research center MRTE
Abstract: This talk interrogates the production of airspace as infrastructure in Singapore, taking into account the city-state’s geographical emplacement in Southeast Asia. It joins aeromobilities research in re-understanding air transport as a socially produced fact of life, but contends, at the same time, that existing scholarship can adopt a keener sensitivity to the way aviation’s infrastructures are non-uniformly created around the world. First, I note the tendency of aeromobilities—and, more generally, mobilities—research to nearly exclusively focus on empirical paradigms emanating from North America, Scandinavia, and parts of Western Europe. Second, I highlight the relative lack of attention to (aero)mobilities’ specific routes of formation, and, within these, the possible interactions among plural geographies. I suggest that these shortcomings have blunted (aero)mobilities research’s critical edge, by silencing the asymmetries of making move in a variety of contexts.
Drawing on assemblage theory, this presentation propounds a more relational understanding of (aero)mobile infrastructures. Informed by a wide range of investigative methods, including interviews, archival research and participant observation, it uses Singapore as an example to chart four different airspace constellations: namely, aircraft cabins, airline route networks, aerial capacities, and air territories. I evince how these formations, though nominally familiar, are compositionally different in the Southeast Asian context. They figure as contingent and contested re-assemblings of dominant types, filtered through established cultural norms, laws, technologies, and institutional set-ups that order the global aviation industry. These insights instruct a need to historicise how infrastructural spaces are produced, as well as point to the pertinence of learning about the latent geopolitics connecting different, and differently positioned, spaces and assemblages.
Date : Thursday, June 14, 2018 from 12:30 to 14:00
Venue : access to the MIR
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