Dylan Brady

Background

About Dylan Brady

I am a human geographer who looks at questions of political and cultural change through the lens of infrastructure. I am an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. My current research project looks at digital payment systems in Singapore and Southeast Asia. The region is a hotspot for the development and—critically—popularization of peer-to-peer digital payments, not outside of but with the support of states and central banks. I'm interested how these payment infrastructures are being built at the national and regional scale, but most of all I am interested in how they are affecting people's everyday experiences of space: what does it mean to travel, to live and work in a world where your financial infrastructure follows you where ever you go?My dissertation analyzed rail infrastructure in China as key site for the production of nation-ness: the sense of national community which coalesces through the skilled practices of everyday life. I drew on multi-sited and infrastructural ethnographic methodologies to investigate skilled traveling practice, and materialist and affective theory to analyze the more-than-human elements of rail space. I have used these frameworks to analyze zero-COVID-era "health code" apps and the automation of airport check-in procedures; infrastructure leads to all sorts of places.