3区社会学

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

Proshant Chakraborty

{"title":"Infrastructural Care: Repairing Railway Trains, Maintaining Mumbai’s Lifeline","authors":"Proshant Chakraborty","doi":"10.1080/00141844.2023.2260960","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2023.2260960","url":null,"abstract":"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","PeriodicalId":47259,"journal":{"name":"Ethnos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135924831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}