Transmotion in the Folkhem: Automobility, Epistemicide, and the Post-Anthropocene

Abstract

The West’s conceptualization of sovereignty of motion (and the mobility of agents) is best represented by automobility. Travel by passenger car symbolizes the modern, atomistic, and allegedly autonomous subject while sidestepping the enormous environmental damage caused by automobility. The automobile emerged as the dominant mode of transportation in Sweden just as romantic notions of the folkhem (“people’s home”) were being imagined as a collective solution to the disturbances caused by industrial capitalism. The imaginary folkhem navigated the car’s ubiquity’s social and environmental externalities by capitulating to automobility. Thus, instead of forcing the automobile to conform to already-existing physical infrastructure and social relations, social relations were reshaped to accommodate the car, resulting in a “car society” (bilsamhälle). In contrast, transmotion, as expressed by Sámi communities, embodies a kind of sovereignty that differs from the West’s understanding of the term as “rule over” people and nature. Transmotion is a capacious concept that extends beyond “movement” understood strictly as “mobility.” It is a moving with, a co-creation with nature. Transmotion is cooperative and relational; it expresses a “solidarity” or “reciprocity” with nature. It is a counter paradigm to Sweden’s automobility-as-national project that has shaped regional inequities and environmental risk in the late Anthropocene.