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Becoming an airline passenger: Body, luggage, and documents

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Abstract

This paper deploys a relational-material approach for tracing the assembly of passengers as they move through airports and use its series of passage points. While many studies analyse airport mobility and passengers’ experiences, few do so with the question of subjectivity as their main theoretical focus. Rather than treating subjectivity as an epiphenomenon or alternatively as a myriad of spatio-sensual experiences, we treat the subjectivity of airline passengers as a product and an achievement: a work of assembly which requires the skilful coordination of body, luggage, and documents. We introduce the notion of ‘mobility capital’ as a vital ingredient in this process of active assembly: learnt variations and improvisations while interacting with the architecture of airports and with the materially embedded regulation of civil aviation account for the process of acquiring the subjectivity of airline passengers and for the variance among them.

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Acknowledgements

Authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their invaluable comments. Thanks for commenting on earlier drafts also to Peter Adey, Fran Tonkiss, and Susan Silbey.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Mor Shilon

  2. Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Ronen Shamir

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  1. Mor Shilon
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  2. Ronen Shamir
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Correspondence to Ronen Shamir.

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I knew what the problem was… the problem was the relationship between my hand as it wielded the sword and the sword itself. These were two different entities. Through practice I could improve my hand-eye coordination – I could make them work together better – but sadly that wasn’t enough. My arm and the sword needed to become one. The muscles in my tendon had to merge with the molecules that made up the sword. I needed to wield it as if it were an extension of my arm. … It was time to look for the sentiment of steel within myself”.

Mohammed Hanif, ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’, Vintage N.Y. 2009, p. 140

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Shilon, M., Shamir, R. Becoming an airline passenger: Body, luggage, and documents. Subjectivity 9, 246–270 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0002-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0002-x

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