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Paper short abstract

How are internationally driven visions of modern and green futures lived through everyday infrastructure? Through mobile ethnography in HCMC public buses, this paper traces how geopolitics unfolds through rhythm, affect, and everyday infrastructural labour.

Paper long abstract

Buses, as mobile infrastructural sites, are entangled with geopolitical ambitions of net-zero commitments and economic assertation. In Ho Chi Minh City, public bus system materialises these ambitions through electrification policies, public-private tendering, and discourses of a "modern" and "civilised" city, translating international climate promises and national developmental imaginaries into everyday urban circulation.

Drawing on eighteen months of mobile ethnography with bus workers, this paper approaches buses as a site of everyday geopolitics, where global agendas, state governance, and corporate infrastructures are felt through embodied labour. Combining Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis with Foucauldian dispositif, the study traces how discourses of progress and efficiency are absorbed into workers' bodily and affective rhythms, producing temporal endurance and uncertainty alongside tactical practices of cooperation.

While officially framed as a green and efficient solution to city moving, the bus system relies on precarious labour and "informal" cooperation between workers and roadside vendors to maintain circulation under constrained temporal regimes. These interactions reveal how infrastructural geopolitics is sustained through not only policy, but also mundane acts of coordination between various actors.

The paper argues that visions of a modern future are produced convergently in everyday encounters between bus workers, private operators, and state authorities. Rather than being positioned simply as subjects of domination or resistance, workers often adapt to and reproduce developmental imaginaries even as infrastructural restructuring threatens their livelihoods. Attending ethnographically to affect, rhythm, and uncertainty reveals how geopolitics unfolds through everyday infrastructure, where future hope emerges as a relational condition in an ascending Asian mega-urban context.