Desire Paths at the Intersection of Activism and Mobilities Scholarship

Keywords: Scholar activism, mobilities, delivery work, e-bikes, desire paths, participatory action research
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper examines a potential form of scholar-activism in the study of mobilities through the metaphor of investigating desire paths or lines, the informal, unauthorized dirt paths made by footsteps of many people who want to get from one place to another in the most direct way. Desire paths represent a form of collective memories of alternative and transgressive possibilities within ordered spaces. To unpack the desire paths situated at the juncture between scholarship and activism, I examine a participatory action research (PAR) project with immigrant food delivery workers in New York City. This work illustrates how a scholarship of desire paths, whether physical or social, explicitly shifts from damage-centered research to desire-based research with communities that affirms a democratized right to research and knowledge production. Furthermore, this research grapples with the tensions that scholar-activists face within academic institutions while deeply intertwined in grassroots movements for justice. In doing so, researching paths of desire is to engage in unauthorized, potentially transgressive interconnections between scholarship and activism that re-member memories in understanding our present, and creating possible alternative futures. Through this framework, I will highlight how scholar activism with delivery workers worked to make politically legible and actionable the transgressive desire paths of delivery workers for legalizing electric bikes that the New York City government had fiercely criminalized.