Tom Hogger Gadsby

Mobility (In)Justice: Colonial Spatial Technologies and Contemporary Transportation Politics in Mexico City

Completion: 01 APR 2026

Background

MA Philosophy

BA Philosophy

PhD

Mobility (In)Justice: Colonial Spatial Technologies and Contemporary Transportation Politics in Mexico City

My research examines transportation infrastructure and spatial inequality in Mexico City, sitting at the intersection of urban geography, mobility justice, and decolonial studies. I trace how colonial administrative technologies and spatial hierarchies persist in contemporary urban planning, examining stark disparities in accessibility alongside patterns of displacement and gentrification.

Critically engaging with technocratic approaches like smart urbanism and social tipping point frameworks, my work explores the politics of transportation change and how resistance movements and counter-geographies challenge both historical inequalities and contemporary technical “solutions” that risk perpetuating colonial spatial logics.

I use a mixed qualitative approach combining computational text analysis of colonial administrative documents with contemporary ethnographic fieldwork examining lived experiences of mobility inequality and grassroots resistance. My computational methods include OCR processing, KWIC (Keywords in Context) and collocation analysis, and machine learning techniques for semantic categorisation. My work is interdisciplinary, bridging urban geography, urban planning, political ecology, history, decolonial studies, and computational methods.

In Simple Terms...

I use AI and machine learning tools to process and analyse large collections of historical documents. This includes OCR (optical character recognition) to convert images of historical texts into machine-readable format, and various NLP (natural language processing) techniques – including semantic categorisation and collocation analysis – to identify linguistic patterns across thousands of pages of colonial administrative documents. These computational tools help me rapidly find patterns in how language was used to construct spatial hierarchies, which I then interpret through decolonial theory and urban studies frameworks.

Supervisors

Lead Supervisor
Ernesto Schwartz-Marín

Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology · University of Exeter
Co-Supervisor
Patricia Murrieta-Flores

School of Humanities and Education · Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico; Chair of Digital Humanities at Lancaster University
Co-Supervisor
Federico Botta

Department of Computer Science · University of Exeter

Back