Choreographing the Airport

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Towards a Practical Cosmopolitanism

   • Justine Shih Pearson

   Pages 1-35

3. Persistent Place or Thirdspace?

   • Justine Shih Pearson

   Pages 37-60

4. Mass Transits, Micro Transitions

   • Justine Shih Pearson

   Pages 61-82

5. Performing Self at the Border

   • Justine Shih Pearson

   Pages 83-101

6. Bodies Under Duress (The Dystopic Future is Here)

   • Justine Shih Pearson

   Pages 103-127

7. Back Matter

   Pages 129-133

   PDF

​This book investigates the global hub airport as an exemplar of cosmopolitan culture and space. A machine made for movement, itself perched at the crossroads of the world’s incessant mobility, the airport is both a symbol of and stage for the ways in which we construct and inhabit the world today.

Taking an ethnographically-inflected approach, this study brings together knowledge of the moving body from dance and performance and the study of systems of mobility within cultural and mobilities studies, in order to call attention to the kinaesthetic experience of global space. What is the choreography of the global airport? How does it perform on us. How do we perform within it?


Extending thinking about contemporary cosmopolitanism and cultural identity, and the performativity of places and identities, this book is essential reading for those interested in cultural debates around globalisation, the innovative application of performance theory towards everyday experience, and interdisciplinary methodologies.

• Culture and space
• Airports
• Global mobility
• Transition
• Travel and transport
• Theory of space
• Bodily experience
• New mobilities
• Contemporary cosmopolitanism and cultural identity
• Choreography

“Choreographing the Airport is a deeply-grounded study of hubs of contemporary global circulation — of bodies, affects, and cultures. No longer imaginable as the sole province of a transnational elite class, airports now function as critical arteries for the movement of refugees, migrants, transnational families, and others. As Shih Pearson’s nuanced examination demonstrates, airports bear a complex relationship to their geographic locations as well as their cosmopolitan functions — a relationship made all the more complex when considered from the perspective of the kinesthetic/somatic experience of its temporary inhabitants. Employing a kinesthetic auto-ethnographic method and combining performance and dance/movement theory, and postcolonial critique, Shih Pearson goes beyond a purely architectural analysis and asks us to attend to how and where we occupy those spaces, either in concert with or occasionally indifferent to global capitalism’s imperatives, asking us to consider the urgently relevant question, “what is it to move in this space?’” (Karen Shimakawa, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, USA)

“This is more than an original exploration of the choreographed spatiality of airports. It is for all those interested by the way one moves in and is moved by space in the era of transnational mobility. What’s more, the text itself is a well choreographed festival of intelligently deployed theory speaking to acutely observed ethnographic material traversed by sharp socio-political observations that make it a pleasure to read.” (Ghassan Hage, School of Social and Political Science, University of Melbourne, Australia)

• University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

  Justine Shih Pearson

Justine Shih Pearson is a designer and scholar of contemporary performance and dance, and Honorary Associate in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Policies and ethics