Peer-reviewed journal articles
Brady, Dylan, and Weiqiang Lin. 2024. “Automating Passenger Work: Airport Labour at the Transductive Interface.” Social & Cultural Geography 25 (4), 525-543. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2023.2197873.
Contemporary airport automation often takes the form of self-service interfaces which transform the work tasks of check-in and boarding. In effect, such interfaces redistribute substantive and complex service labour to passengers. This article rethinks contemporary automation through the lens of the interface and examines how such automation constitutes a spatially-extended and more-than-technological assemblage that reconfigures labour across the consumer-worker divide. Rather than drawing clear lines between agential humans and technical things, we examine human elements of the interface as also having technicity within the spatialities of automation. Drawing on interviews with passenger services personnel at the two largest airports in Beijing, China, we find that at self-service interfaces airport workers step out of the way to allow passengers to step up, interfacing directly with ‘backend’ airport digital infrastructure previously limited to paid personnel. In place of routine transduction, the work of check-in and boarding agents becomes regulatory, i.e. assisting, trouble-shooting and understanding: the work that cannot be automated. This work includes handling those passengers that self-service interfaces exclude: passengers who stray from – or cannot adhere to – the form of the generic, skilled and legible PAX. In closing, we consider this paper’s implications for future research on automation, spatiality and labour.
Brady, Dylan. 2023 [online: 2022]. “Infrastructural Imaginaries of Region and Nation in the Pearl River Delta’s Express Railway Link.” Journal of Contemporary China, 32 (141): 495–509. https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2022.2090110.
The Express Railway Link (XRL) offers unprecedented mobility within the Pearl River Delta and connects Hong Kong to mainland China’s high-speed rail network. As reflected in the pages of regional and national newspapers, the XRL figures prominently in the re-imagining of scales of community and governance in the Pearl River Delta. These ‘infrastructural imaginaries’ are shaped not just by the transportation infrastructure of trains and stations, but also by the migration infrastructure of travel permits and identification cards. Drawing on infrastructure studies and the politics of scale to shed light on the multi-scalar politics of infrastructure in contemporary China, this article traces how understandings of infrastructure and scale changed as the XRL went from regional project to one component of China’s national high-speed rail grid.
Yu, Yi, Dylan Brady, and Bo Zhao. 2022. “Digital Geographies of the Bug: A Case Study of China’s Contact Tracing Systems in the COVID-19.” Geoforum 137: 94–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.10.007.
The COVID-19 pandemic has radically expanded the role of algorithmic governance in everyday mobility. In China, urban and provincial governments have introduced health codes app as a national contract tracing and quarantine enforcement method to restrict the movements of “risky” individuals through malls, subways, railways, as well as between regions. Yet the health codes have been implemented with uneven efficacy and unexpected consequences. Drawing on glitch politics, we read these unintended consequences as “bugs” emerging from the introduction of platform-based management into everyday life. These bugs mediated individuals’ lived experiences of the digital app and the hybrid space constituted by population governance, individual digital navigation, and technology. Drawing on a database of posts scraped from Zhihu, a popular Chinese question-and-answer site, we examine three dimensions of the bug: the algorithmic bug, the territorial bug, and the corporeal bug. This paper sheds light on the significance of end-user experiences in digital infrastructure and contributes to our understanding of the digital geographies of bugs in algorithmic governance and platform urbanism.
Brady, Dylan. 2021. “The Circulatory Panopticon: Real Names, Rail Infrastructure and Foucault’s Realist Turn.” Political Geography 90 (October): 102463. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102463.
This article examines the contemporary Chinese rail system as a circulatory panopticon: an apparatus that uses the “natural” movements of the population to render them legible and safe. The panoptic effect of rail space has emerged only recently. The Chinese state's introduction of the “real-name system” has made a state-legible identity an inextricable part of everyday life, and recent transformations in ticketing and station entry have placed it at the center of mobility practices as well. Synthesizing Foucault's apparatus of security with Karen Barad's realist conception of the apparatus, this article examines how the more-than-human elements of the rail system realize a panoptic assemblage out of the movements of passengers. Based on participant observation and interview data, this article examines three key elements of the rail system: the national identity card, the ticket, and the station entrance. Drawing on Barad's account of diffraction, I analyze how the particular material characteristics of these things both function to realize the circulatory panopticon and also to introduce novel discontinuities and fractures. This paper makes two contributions. First, it argues for a greater attention to the question of reality in Foucault's thinking: just as the art of government increasingly recognizes and calibrates itself against ‘reality,’ Foucault's analysis of governmentality becomes increasingly realist. Second, it shows how infrastructure is simultaneously a font of state power and a source of problems for the state—a contradiction deeply relevant in China today.
Brady, Dylan. 2021. “Being a Chinese Passenger: Practicing Quality and Civilization on the Rail.” cultural geographies, April 22. DOI: 10.1177/14744740211012010.
This article examines how everyday practices materialize abstract discourses of social “quality” within the spaces of the Chinese rail system. Rail travel remains a primary mode of transportation in China, competitive on cost and comfort—though not at the same time. This article brings together geographies of skill and mobility to examine how the skilled practice of rail travel produces high and low “quality” bodies and spaces within the rail network. Drawing on Ingold’s “dwelling perspective” to shed light on how movement creates cultural landscape at the national scale, I argue that the growing socio-economic gap within China has led to the emergence of distinct and incompatible traveling practices within the rail ridership. The conflict between a “lacking” ridership relying on mutual tolerance and a “quality” ridership prioritizing self-containment been resolved by the construction of high-speed rail as a separate network, segregating “high” and “low” quality riderships while still serving both.
Brady, Dylan. 2021. “Between Nation and State: Boundary Infrastructures, Communities of Practice and Everyday Nation-Ness in the Chinese Rail System.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, January. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654420986810.
This paper draws on thinking within political geography and science and technology studies to examine how the infrastructure of the Chinese rail system situates the practices of individual passengers within the national community. Specifically, I employ Star’s boundary object frame- work to trace how hot water taps and their associated objects integrate multiple communities of practice into rail space while also producing fractures within the ridership. The practice of hot water drinking, like rail infrastructure, is the product of Chinese state-making. In contemporary China, however, thermoses and instant noodles have become markers not just of Chinese nation- ness but of particular sub-national communities of practice. I argue recent conflicts over their use and even presence in rail space reflect and realize fractures within broader society. This paper’s analysis of the Chinese rail system contributes to a clearer understanding of how top-down and bottom-up forces interact within China’s domestic infrastructural development. Incorporating the materiality of infrastructure allows political geographers to better understand how the nation-ness of certain bodies and practices are entangled with the built environment, moving from imagined communities to communities of practice.
Editor-reviewed articles
Brady, Dylan. 2019. “Lines,” in the “Volumetric Sovereignty” forum. Society and Space.(http://societyandspace.org/2019/03/03/lines/)
Lines are willfully ignorant of volume. Precisely because of this, lines are forced to confront volume at every turn. As they strive to abstract themselves down to one dimension, lines must negotiate endlessly with all three stubbornly material dimensions. Their linearity is never more than a bargain of convenience, a tolerable approximation of an abstract ideal. Abstraction is not itself an abstract process.
PhD dissertation
Brady, Dylan. 2020. “Navigating Chinese-ness: Infrastructure, Community and the More-Than-Human Nation.” University of Oregon. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/25634.
The Chinese rail system is among the largest, densest, and most heavily used rail networks in the world, playing a central role in the circulation of migrant workers, students, professionals and tourists within China’s domestic sphere. Research has examined the rail system’s role in China’s political economy and its use as a tool of statecraft, yet little research has been conducted on the rail system as a social space. How does rail travel contribute to the formation of community and place at the national scale? This dissertation argues that reconceptualizing the nation as a more-than-human assemblage illuminates how rail travel weaves together people, things and infrastructure to form a coherent but heterogeneous whole. Drawing on more-than-human methodologies, fieldwork was conducted over seven months in 2016 and 2017. Spanning the geographic extent of the Chinese rail system, from its core to its far-flung peripheries, participant-observation gathered data on how the practices of rail skillfully assemble material things and spaces to produce a coherent system. Semi-structured interviews with passengers from a range of regional, generational, and socio-economic backgrounds gathered data on how the things and spaces of rail travel are perceived and how their use has evolved. This account of rail’s more-than-human dimensions informs the analysis of mainland Chinese discourses around the 2018 opening of the first high-speed rail (HSR) line to Hong Kong. This project finds a system standardized over remarkable distances, characterized by a distinctively Chinese assemblage of infrastructures, objects and practices. This assemblage plays a vital role in knitting together China’s diverse regions and communities into an integrated national territory and community. Practices reflect national conceptions of class, and ticketing interpolates national citizens. Yet it is also a system riven with fractures. A two-tiered system is emerging which mirrors, roughly, a divided ridership: poor migrants depend on the cheaper conventional services, while the better off tend towards the speed and comfort of HSR. In the Pearl River Delta, centralized national standards produce fractures at the regional scale. The more-than-human environment of Chinese rail re-inscribes and realizes underlying tensions and contradictions within Chinese nation-ness.
Master’s thesis
Brady, Dylan. 2014. “Forging the Nation Through Rails: Transportation Infrastructure and the Emergence of Chinese Nationalism.” University of Oregon. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/17904
While nationalism remains a vital element in the production of the political and economic landscape, it is often treated as a static container for other processes or neglected altogether. Rather, it must itself be treated as a process—a nationalizing project—emerging from a constellation of often contradictory social forces. One such process of nationalization is the development of large-scale transportation infrastructure, such as railroads. These projects produce both new spheres of circulation and new understandings critical to navigating these novel environments, which together radically transform the relation between people, government, and territory. In early twentieth century China, the complicated contest over railroad rights produced and was produced by a fractured political economic geography. Understandings of both identity and space remained fragmented, cohering only partially into a singular entity, thus demonstrating the intimate interrelation between state power, political identity, and territories both real and imagined.
Sun Yat-sen’s proposed national railway network, circa 1922.