Ethnos最新文献

英文中文

Infrastructural Care: Repairing Railway Trains, Maintaining Mumbai’s Lifeline 基础设施护理:修理铁路列车，维护孟买的生命线

3区社会学 Q1 Social Sciences

Ethnos

Pub Date : 2023-09-24 DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2023.2260960

Proshant Chakraborty

ABSTRACTMumbai’s suburban railway network is one of the largest, most densely-packed public transport systems in the world. Known as the city’s ‘lifeline,’ these trains carry eight million commuters every day and provide crucial connectivity. Drawing on fieldwork at a railway carshed, this article uses infrastructural care as an analytic to ethnographically explore how practices of preventive and corrective maintenance not only repair trains but are also crucial in maintaining spatiotemporal flows produced by urban infrastructures. Repair and maintenance involve a distribution and convergence of human and nonhuman agencies that simultaneously reveals the ontological multiplicity of trains while also stabilising them as sociotechnical assemblages. In doing so, repair attempts to render faults knowable to predict and prevent failures, which then instantiates new routines across the traction rolling stock. However, carshed engineers also face bureaucratic pressures of ensuring both punctuality and safety, thus necessitating the managing of maintenance within increasingly saturated capacities.KEYWORDS: CareinfrastructuremaintenanceMumbairailway trainsrepair AcknowledgementsI am grateful to the Railway officials, engineers, and workers at the carshed for giving me the opportunity and permission to conduct fieldwork. I am indebted to them for taking the time to share their knowledge, experiences, insight, and wisdom. I am thankful to Anna Bohlin and Ruy Blanes for their supervision, guidance, and encouragement. I would also like to thank my PhD colleagues, Signe Askersjö, Mathias Kristiansen, and Anders Lauridsen, for their comments on earlier drafts. This manuscript also benefitted from feedback I received at the SGS Publication Workshop with Florian Kühn, Sofie Hellberg, and Kilian Spandler. Finally, I am also thankful to the three anonymous reviewers, whose comments helped sharpen the analytical arguments of the previous manuscript draft. The views expressed in this article, and any shortcomings or drawbacks therein, are mine alone and do not represent the policies and/or practices of the Indian Railways.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 All names are pseudonymised in this article. Following the usual convention at carsheds, I add the suffix ‘sir’ or ‘mistri’ – which also indicate organisational or professional roles – to the names of my interlocutors.2 In all these instances, workers followed prescribed safety protocols, such as de-electrifying overheard cables, attaching earthing rods on them, putting ‘Do not operate’ signs on the trains, and so forth.3 Being a commuter was something I had in common with almost all my interlocutors, which helped establish rapport and inspired several conversations around the experience of travelling in local trains. Like them, I am also deeply and personally aware of how these trains are Mumbai’s literal and metaphorical ‘lifeline,’ having been on the receiv

例如，正在进行的轨道维护需要实施速度限制，这经常导致延误，信号系统故障或下雨和雾等恶劣天气事件也是如此我想感谢第一个和第二个匿名评论者，他们的建议帮助我澄清了错误、失败和故障的使用工人们用“职责”来解释这一点，即八小时轮班。拆卸牵引电机，运行功能测试，然后重新安装，每个人需要完成一个任务，或者总共需要大约24小时——对于一辆正常运行的火车来说，在车棚里滞留的时间太长了工人和工程师在进行这些翻新时遵守了印度铁路研究与设计标准组织(RDSO)规定的原始指导方针虽然对风险和文化理论的详细讨论超出了本文的范围，但我意识到风险社会学的关键见解如何与印度和世界当代铁路问题的讨论相关。这包括新自由主义下的风险社会化和利润私有化(见Bear Citation2020)。我要感谢第三位匿名评论者让我注意到这一点。

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