Aeromobilities’ extra-sectoral costs: a methodological reorientation

ABSTRACT

For over a decade, scholars have graced a number of aeromobilities’ socio-cultural dimensions, from being in an airport to commanding an aeroplane. Yet, while this work has heightened appreciations of the political nature of aerial worlds, the propensity has been to focus on the immediate arrangements and politics related to flight. Using civil aviation as an example, this article offers a methodological reorientation and conceptual rethink of how aeromobilities’ (re)production invokes far-reaching political economies in excess of the core activity of aerial conveyances. It seeks to open up worldly webs of iniquitous movements and relations that make aerial life – rather than flying per se – possible in the first place. Interspersing a selection of our research with extant literature, reports and statistics, the article outlines, in coincidence with our earlier findings, two ways in which civil aviation has thus incurred extensive extra-sectoral costs: the material mobilisation of resources for air infrastructures, and the mobilisation of populations and labour for aeromobile development. The discussion aims ultimately to promote a more nuanced understanding of the constituents, and costs, of moving in the present age.

KEYWORDS:

• Aeromobilities
• civil aviation
• extra-sectoral costs
• methodological reorientation
• infrastructure
• labour
• political economy

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Kevin Hannam, Pennie Drinkall and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments that made this paper a more robust one. They have also benefited from feedback received at ‘Up in the air: geographies of trouble and hope at 35,000ft’ convened by Stephen Ison and Lucy Budd at the RGS-IBG International Conference in 2019. As well, the authors are grateful to their research respondents, who include logistics workers, cabin crew, pilots, and operations staff who generously offered their time and expertise. All errors remain the authors’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the National University of Singapore Start Up Grant (Grant No. R-109-000-217-133) and supported by the Moving Matters programme group at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research.