Encountering stressed bodies: Slow creep transformations and tipping points of commuting mobilities

Abstract

This article examines how stressful commutes are changing the bodies that are caught up in this everyday mobility. Contrasting with psychological research on commuter stress that makes generalised claims about the commuting experience, this article develops a non-representational understanding of bodies. From this point of view, stress is seen as having a much more ambivalent and complex constitution through the way in which everyday practices of commuting are implicated in processes of bodily transformation. Conceptually, whilst drawing attention to the radically contingent and irreducibly specific nature of commuter stress, the paper emphasises the significance of attending to subtle, slow creep transformations within daily habits that necessarily build to tipping points over time, thus offering a new way of understanding disruption in the context of commuting. Methodologically, it stages an expressionistic capture of these affective signs of slow creep transformation and tipping points through an interview encounter in Sydney. This encounter, while involving reflections on my own participation, aims to solicit from the interviewee a heightened exposure to those subtle transformations that, when noticed, can create a cascade of backward-tracing realisations. Disciplinarily, it impresses the importance for mobilities research to more sharply attend to these affective folds that both undergird and destabilise life on the move.