The 2023 Global Mobility Humanities Conference (GMHC) and Annual Conference of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T²M)
Critical Island Studies
2026 GMHC Keynote Speakers
Sarah Sharma (University of Toronto)
Sarah Sharma is Professor of Media Theory at the ICCIT and Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. She is the author In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (2014), Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech (2026), and (co-editor) Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan 2022) all published by Duke University Press.
The Infrastructure of Patriarchy's Insufferable Tools
This talk will draw insights from my recently published book, Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Tech (Duke UP, 2026), to consider the relationship between technology and the patriarchal temporality of gig work in the city. In particular, I focus on how mundane technologies (smartphones, apps, Fitbits, assistive devices, AI companions, chatbots, digital assistants, water bottles with digital reminders, and sleep monitors) organize the temporal and spatial contours of the day in such a way that upholds a maternal mandate fundamental to the reproduction of patriarchy. Together these technologies compose a media complex that includes machinic forms of care and intimacy, and constitute an unacknowledged gendered normativity tied to capital. While these technologies manage time and the mundane tasks of social reproduction, they also uphold a binarized and gendered division of labor in the absence of bodies. In this talk, I ask us to consider how feminist machine logics could re-organize the temporal and spatial contours of the day. A feminist technological future demands, then, not a life free from the logic of machines, but rather a different set of machine logics—feminist techno-logics.
Jiat-Hwee Chang (National University of Singapore)
Dr. Chang has a PhD in Architecture from University of California Berkeley. He is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersections of architecture, environment and STS. His current research interests revolve around the socio-political, technoscientific, and built environmental aspects of addressing the climate crisis. They include (1) thermal politics and climate change; (2) energy, infrastructure and low carbon futures; and (3) critical carbon heritage. He is the author of A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (2016), which was awarded an International Planning History Society Book Prize 2018 and shortlisted for the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies Humanities Book Prize 2017. His latest book, Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore (co-authored with Justin Zhuang and Darren Soh), was published in late 2022.
Thermal Governance and Infrastructures of (Im)Mobilities: Stadiums for 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar
What regime of thermal governance inform the making of infrastructure that facilitates the mobilities of mega sports events?
Through controversies surrounding the design, planning, and construction of stadiums for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, this paper explores three intersecting types of (im)mobilities, each shaped by the thermal politics of a rapidly warming world. First, the mobility of global mega-sports events between hosts in diverse geographies and climates, and the mounting challenge of staging tournaments based on "temperate-normative" calendar in increasingly extreme heat environments. Second, the radically differential mobilities and immobilities of people whose material and immaterial labor were central to the hosting of the tournament. They range from the small number of nationals, who were legally the only permanent residents of Qatar, to the large number of transient migrant workers and expatriates, whose movement were regulated based on how their labor were valued. Third, the physical and economic mobilities and interconversions of hydrocarbons in which Qatar's enormous oil and especially gas reserves were transformed into energy services and hydrocarbon revenues that fund an immensely carbon-intensive spectacle that further exacerbated the extreme heat of the world's most rapidly warming region. Furthermore, the hydrocarbon wealth bankrolled the thermal infrastructures designed to cool, i.e. transfer the heat away from, the athletes and spectators while simultaneously overexposing migrant outdoor workers who built and maintain these infrastructures to the very same heat.
Drawing on a book project on thermal governance and citizenship in Singapore and Doha, this paper argues that these three mobility types are connected by a single logic: the uneven and inequitable governance of heat. The stadiums, and the wider infrastructure of the tournament, functioned as a graduated thermal mobility regime--valuing some bodies more than others, channelling them into energy-intensive, climatically-controlled comfort while stranding others in structural heat violence. This regime, the paper argues, is not an exception but the norm that captures the thermal politics of the Anthropocene.
