Towards a Politics of Routes and Routing

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper explores the concepts of routes and routing in the context of human mobility, shedding light on how routes shape movements and contribute to the formation and transformation of kinetic hierarchies. While significant attention has been given to roads, paths, railways, canals and other forms of route in mobility studies, these have not cohered into critical accounts of routes and routing. People and things do not move at random across an isotropic plain. This is the first lesson of mobility—people and things follow, and create, routes. This paper argues for a theorisation of routes and routing through an examination of approaches to routes in art and theory, exploring how routes create infrastructures of power as well as the use of selfmade routes—desire lines—to trace out possible alternatives to the nfrastructural present. The analysis of routes and routing forms a key part of a wider politics of mobility. The paper argues that while borders have received substantial theoretical attention, routes and routing have been relatively undertheorised in mobility studies and elsewhere. It asks what would happen if we theorised routes and routing in a similar way to the theorisation of borders and bordering?