Domesticating Transport: the Sensory Experience of Work-Related Travel

Abstract

Whether leaving early, arriving late, or travelling at night, the particular temporality of work-related travel entails travelling in moments of fragility, when the body is in need of rest and particularly vulnerable to different sensory intrusions. To cope, travelers have to domesticate their spaces of transit and create habits to make the places and spaces encountered through the body their own. Unlike the traveler who goes on vacation to take a break from his or her day-to-day life, workers on the move construct continuities in their ruptured experience to maintain the equilibrium that structures their professional and non-professional time in movement, which is punctuated by technical, climactic and/or temporal uncertainties, hindrances to finding one’s bearings. Moving week after week is therefore a multidimensional experience that engages the body and appeals to the senses. How does the body, as a vehicle of memory, engage different ways of thinking and acting in the present and confronting disruption? The following observations and analyses are informed by different traditions of French research that seek to analyze sensoriality in particular and understand, more broadly, what motivates behavioral change.

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