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Contemporary airport automation often takes the form of self-service interfaces which transform the work tasks of check-in and boarding. In effect, such interfaces redistribute substantive and complex service labour to passengers. This article rethinks contemporary automation through the lens of the interface and examines how such automation constitutes a spatially-extended and more-than-technological assemblage that reconfigures labour across the consumer-worker divide. Rather than drawing clear lines between agential humans and technical things, we examine human elements of the interface as also having technicity within the spatialities of automation. Drawing on interviews with passenger services personnel at the two largest airports in Beijing, China, we find that at self-service interfaces airport workers step out of the way to allow passengers to step up, interfacing directly with 'back-end' airport digital infrastructure previously limited to paid personnel. In place of routine transduction, the work of check-in and boarding agents becomes regulatory, i.e. assisting, trouble-shooting and understanding: the work that cannot be automated. This work includes handling those passengers that self-service interfaces exclude: passengers who stray from – or cannot adhere to – the form of the generic, skilled and legible PAX. In closing, we consider this paper's implications for future research on automation, spatiality and labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Express Railway Link (XRL) offers unprecedented mobility within the Pearl River Delta and connects Hong Kong to mainland China's high-speed rail network. As reflected in the pages of regional and national newspapers, the XRL figures prominently in the re-imagining of scales of community and governance in the Pearl River Delta. These 'infrastructural imaginaries' are shaped not just by the transportation infrastructure of trains and stations, but also by the migration infrastructure of travel permits and identification cards. Drawing on infrastructure studies and the politics of scale to shed light on the multi-scalar politics of infrastructure in contemporary China, this article traces how understandings of infrastructure and scale changed as the XRL went from regional project to one component of China's national high-speed rail grid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how everyday practices materialize abstract discourses of social "quality" within the spaces of the Chinese rail system. Rail travel remains a primary mode of transportation in China, competitive on cost and comfort—though not at the same time. This article brings together geographies of skill and mobility to examine how the skilled practice of rail travel produces high and low "quality" bodies and spaces within the rail network. Drawing on Ingold's "dwelling perspective" to shed light on how movement creates cultural landscape at the national scale, I argue that the growing socio-economic gap within China has led to the emergence of distinct and incompatible traveling practices within the rail ridership. The conflict between a "lacking" ridership relying on mutual tolerance and a "quality" ridership prioritizing self-containment been resolved by the construction of high-speed rail as a separate network, segregating "high" and "low" quality riderships while still serving both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]