Academy Fellow

David Bissell’s cultural geographical research investigates the impacts that different kinds of work-related mobility are having on our cities, our communities, on our relationships with each other, and on our sense of self. This research responds to a pressing need to better understand transformations currently happening to how and where work gets done. David uses these findings to engage governments and industry to advocate for socially-just policy changes. His research has developed through three strands:

David has advanced the study of the mobilities of work. Focusing on the interlocking nature of everyday practices has enabled him to account for how different kinds of work-related travel impact far beyond the journeys themselves, a fact that was previously underplayed in the literature. His research on commuting has found that daily commuting and other work-related travel can have profound effects on people’s sense of self, their home life, their work life, and their sense of place. He established that commuting alters people’s social relations in the city, intensifies certain social inequalities, and changes people’s career and life aspirations in complex ways. A subsequent project pushed these themes in a new direction by focusing on the distinctive challenges of long-distance labour mobility, focusing on the understudied impact on family members who are ‘left behind’ when one family member works away from home. 

A parallel strand of research has developed novel understandings about the changeability of affective bodily capacities in work-related practices. To this end, David has made sustained contributions to a body of cultural geographical work known as ‘non-representational theory’. Here, his research on embodied practices and micropolitical change has explained how bodily skills are much more changeable than other research has indicated. This has led to the development of new ways of understanding everyday habits as changeable and available to be worked on, which contrasts with the usual way of thinking about habits as banal repetition. Developing questions of social justice through an experiential dimension, his more recent work in this area has helped to push non-representational geographical scholarship in a new direction by exploring affective relations characterised by disconnection, generating novel ways of understanding bodily limitations. 

Most recently, David’s research has focused more heavily on the impacts of new digital technologies on work mobilities. Through this work he has made contributions to enhancing understandings of how digital technologies are transforming people’s sense of self and their connections with others in relation to changing work practices. He has explored how robotics and digital automation is changing how and where work gets done through several projects. Through his research with resource sector workers, he developed a new method of ‘storying’ automation to better grasp how workers comprehend their evolving relationship with digital automation technologies, and his most recent project has pushed these themes in a new direction by exploring how digital platforms in on-demand mobile work are changing consumption, production and governance in cities while deepening social inequalities and creating new forms of digital divide. 

Professor, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Melbourne

Founder and Chair, Australian Mobilities Research Network (AusMob)

Managing Editor, Social & Cultural Geography

Director of Research Capability, Melbourne Centre for Cities 

Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2017-2022)

Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (2012-2015)

Member, Institute of Australian Geographers

1. Bissell, D. (2018) Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

2. Bissell, D., Straughan, E. and Gorman-Murray, A. (2020) ‘Losing touch with people and place: labor mobilities, desensitized bodies, disconnected lives’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110(6), 1891-1906.

3. Bissell, D. (2021) ‘Encountering automation: redefining bodies through stories of technological change’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39(2), 366-384.  

4. Bissell, D. (2022) ‘The anaesthetic politics of being unaffected: embodying insecure digital platform labour’, Antipode, 54(1), 86-105. 

5. Bissell, D. (2023) ‘Negative urbanism: unknowability, illegibility and ambivalence in the platform city,’ City, 27(1/2), 56-75.