Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities

Abstract

This article interrogates the corporeal experience of the event of waiting during the process of journeying. Rather than focusing on differential speed as central to charting the contingent relationality between mobilities and immobilities as has been the dominant mode of reasoning in mobility studies, I argue for a renewed focus on the body, specifically through the relationality between activity and inactivity. In this way, the event of waiting is no longer conceptualised as a dead period of stasis or stilling, or even a slower urban rhythm, but is instead alive with the potential of being other than this. Through an appreciation of the dynamic nature of temporality, this essay charts a journey through the relative in/activities embodied through waiting and concludes that waiting as an event should be conceptualised not solely as an active achievement or passive acquiescence but as a variegated affective complex where experience folds through and emerges from a multitude of different planes.