Approaching a praxeological ethics of pandemic mobilities in advanced liberalism

This paper reports on a qualitative video-ethnography on mid-pandemic public transport practices in Denmark. In Denmark, passenger rates in public transport dropped dramatically during the pandemic. To some extent, the drop was a result of people not transporting themselves at all, but according to several surveys and quantitative studies, it was, for a significant part, a result of a mass flight from the (idea of) increased risk of transmission in confined public spaces, such as public transport.

Freudendal-Pedersen (2009) points out that the apparent path dependency of current car-dominated ways of living is co-constituted by certain structural stories that constitute reality and ‘normality’. Some of her often-used examples of such stories are: ‘if you have kids, you need a car’ and ‘the trains are always delayed’. Similarly, I argue that car-dependency is co-constituted by certain contingently, but not arbitrarily, available justification resources that are intertwined with a governmental rationality to continuously free and fulfil oneself, which, for instance, makes it very easy to justify car-driving with reference to one’s obligations as an effective and reliable employee (Lindegaard 2014, 2015 and 2016).

As part of our project on mid-pandemic public transport practices, we did a focus group study with both users and non-users of public transport. Considering the steep passenger drops, I expected the data to reveal that ‘fear of transmission’ had come to represent yet another readily available excuse for not using public transport. However, the qualitative data does not readily confirm this expectation. Rather, the participants carefully avoid referring to ‘fear of transmission’ as a relevant concern in relation to their mobilities practices. In this paper, I propose that these somewhat unexpected findings can be understood in terms of a situated enactment or negotiation of a particular praxeological ethics of mobilities in advanced liberalism (Rose, 1999).