Profiling the passenger: mobilities, identities, embodiments

Abstract

What makes the figure of the passenger distinctive as both a subject and an object of mobility and transportation systems? What distinguishes the passenger from other mobile subjectivities, from nomad, flaneur to consumer? How is the passenger represented, practiced and performed? How has the passenger and their experiences been conceived, imagined, manipulated, regulated and engineered? And what kind of human-technology assemblages do passengers enact? Through four short perspectives, this paper seeks to ‘profile’ the passenger as a distinctive historical and conceptual figure that can help to add greater precision to the analysis of our mobile ways of life. The passenger is explored as an object of speculative theoretical debate, a figure entangled in a host of identities, practices, performances and contexts, and an important way to illuminate key conceptual problematics, from representation to embodiment.