DYLAN BRADY

I am a human geographer who looks at questions of political and cultural change through the lens of infrastructure. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon and I am now an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore.

My research examines how geopolitical abstractions like “nation” and  “state” emerge through and manifest within the mundane things and banal practices of everyday life. My dissertation analyzed rail infrastructure as key site for the production of nation-ness: the sense of national community which coalesces through the skilled practices of everyday life. I draw on multi-sited and infrastructural ethnographic methodologies to investigate skilled traveling practice, and materialist and affective theory to analyze the more-than-human elements of rail space. My work speaks to three topics of broad interest within human geography: the fractured geographies of nationhood, the theorization of materiality in a more-than-human world, and the cultural and political economy of mobility in contemporary China.