ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that within research on mobilities, comfort is often treated as a predictable effect of different technologies of transit. It shows how comfort and discomfort are bodily evaluations of experience that change over time, often in subtle ways, in relation to changing circumstances. The chapter demonstrates how these bodily evaluations give rise to different tactics that aim to maximise people’s powers of acting. It illustrates not only how aggregate accounts of comfort can be problematic, but that aggregate accounts also overlook the transitional way that events and encounters are registered by bodies and evaluated as being comfortable or uncomfortable, changing them in the process. What counts for a comfortable or uncomfortable commute is often assumed to be already known. The chapter presents the understanding of comfort as an affective resonance to explore the relational sense of comfort further and how we might understand it in terms of a process of learning to become active.