Follow the action: understanding the conflicting temporalities of ships, river, authorities and family through distributed ethnography

Abstract

This article analyses the interplay between movement and stasis on Western European inland waterways by looking at four different orderings: navigational, regulatory, market, and intimate. These orderings are ongoing situated practices, which actors carry out in distributed sociomaterial assemblages. This was investigated through ethnographic fieldwork that was not only mobile, but also distributed across sites, both on land and the water. When following different actors, the key is to follow the action through which they are connected. Mobilising and immobilising ships is also achieved from land by control room operators, cargo brokers, family members and non-human actors like radar networks, geo-locative AIS apps, and water level databases. It became clear that often actors need to give market orderings priority and rearrange their position in other orderings accordingly, which results in palpable pressure, manifested in different problems that all concern time. Skippers take risks to be just in time, to find resting time and to mediate asynchronous rhythms of loved ones on land, all the while maintaining critical spatio-temporal separation with riverbed, embankment and other ships. Media play an important role in the assemblages: they keep separate what would otherwise collide and connect to deal with separation.