The following is part of the introduction to a paper that was accepted to the National Communication Association’s annual meeting, held in San Francisco. Enjoy!

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The purpose of this project weighs me down. It is not just in the writing of it; I carry the heft of it where ever I go. I feel its weight as I walk down the halls of the university, as I travel to and from school; it even follows me as I go about my leisurely activities. Yet it doesn’t feel burdensome, it feels like something that I must carry. Just as I pack my things before I begin my day of school, so too I pack this purpose. Since my project seeks to explore the ways that neoliberal ideology, subjectivity, and citizenship are produced, negotiated, and/or contested along a the T-Third light rail line, it is obvious that the purpose is most present while I ride public transit, both for personal and research-related reasons.

            On this particular day I was riding for both reasons and decided to board the Muni at the Powell station. I needed to do some shopping before I began my fieldwork, so it made sense that I would make the central shopping district my transportation hub. From the Powell Station I could easily make my trek on the T-Third and, when finished with fieldwork, to buy a shirt or hat to show my support for the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Thunder are a young NBA team that would be in the playoffs against the much more mature Los Angeles Lakers the following day. I would be driving to Los Angeles in the pre-dawn hours to see the game in person.

            As I was mapping out my day and settling on the order that I would accomplish my tasks, I began to reflect on the ideas of mobility and privilege. They distracted me. My thoughts wandered as I sat waiting for the T-Third to take me to Bayview. I began to think of the people around me. The first thing that I noticed is that there were only a few people waiting. Among the Saturday afternoon shoppers were three young female shoppers who appeared to be in their early twenties. These women had shopping bags from various retailers in the area: Juicy Couture, Bandolino, Betsey Johnson, and H&M among others. The places that they had already shopped that afternoon were parts of a story that told me about them. Why were these companies marketing to them? Was it their apparent hipness? Their gender? Their whiteness? The way that they carried themselves, interacted with each other, and moved in their own bodies told me that it was all of these things and more; to the list I would add their mobility.

            Inherent in mobility is a certain amount of privilege. In this context it might include the ability to travel freely between different parts of the city: shopping, eating, consuming, researching. It might also mean the ability to move freely between markets. Of all the things that mobility might entail, I can only say one thing with certainty: it entails moving through space. The purpose of my project begins to creep back in.

            This project is a critical ethnography of a newly constructed light rail line that runs from one of the most affluent and newly gentrified areas of San Francisco, the Mission Bay neighborhood, to one of the most racially homogenous, economically underserved, and “blighted” areas of San Francisco, Bayview/Hunters Point. I am not able to believe, given this contrast, that the construction of this light rail was neutral. Whose interests are served? What are the underlying ideologies that drive those interested parties? How are those ideologies manifested along the rail line? I find the beginning of an answer to these questions in the young women with whom I shared a Muni platform. The answer has to do markets, modernity (their apparent hipness), gender, and class and racial politics (their whiteness), all of which inform the construction of the Third Street Light Rail. Together these components represent facets of a larger structure referred to as neoliberalism.

            Neoliberalism, defined broadly, is a political rationality that portends more open markets, less economic regulation and an increased reliance on the private sector. All of this is done to increase economic growth, quicken market expansion, and to create the conditions for broad market liberalization (Brown, 2003). Yet, do the young women chatting on the Muni platform actively engage in these structural components of the economy? While I’ll contend that they do, their role is rarely interrogated. Often critical thinkers turn their critical eye toward sets of policies that enable neoliberal market economics (e.g. Harvey, 2005); leaving individual market subjects the freedom of mobility without critical inquiry.

            The multiple shopping bags that my platform companions held demonstrated their mobility. From store to store, cash-register to cash-register they traveled through this international/global city flexing their purchasing muscle. With each scrawl of their signature across a credit slip, they bought into the neoliberal phantasmagoria. Each of those scrawls can be seen as a stamp in a passport. These women are neoliberal citizens. The have purchased the luxury of not knowing the structural conditions that must be in place for them to qualify for their must-act-now-zero-interest-no-annual-fee credit cards. They have also purchased the luxury of not knowing the political and economic situations that must exist in many third world countries in order for them to buy their low cost, high demand commodities. Among these conditions that they (we) are afforded the luxury of not “knowing” are the commodification of human labor and human capital. Unearthing how these luxuries are naturalized and how they remain unproblematized as we move about the city is part and parcel of the purpose of this project.