Affective disposition and aspirational struggles: A more-than-representational Bourdieusian analysis of grassroots transport activism

This paper examines the emotional and aspirational dynamics of grassroots transport activism in Hong Kong at a time of contracting civic space through a Bourdieusian-affective lens. The study combined a sensitising review of 766 social media posts (2020–23), interviews in 2023 with 15 activists and two of their institutional interlocutors (a transport official and a district councillor) and follow-up conversations in 2024–25. Everyday attachments to public transport, formed through long histories of embodied mobility, shape feelings of recognition, loss, and belonging, and become politicised within emerging activist groups. Mobilisations around bus rationalisation, congestion, and route withdrawal answer not only to technical framings of demand but to orientations sedimented in habitus, which underpin struggles over symbolic control, the repair of stigma attached to “transport hobbyism”, and efforts to convert subcultural passion into professional legitimacy. That conversion runs on sticky affinities: credentials and expertise are pursued not only for what they return but because the pursuit itself becomes compelling. Returns are seldom legible, so activists rarely learn whether their report led to a change; recognition is inferred rather than observed, and uneven illusio names the variation in whether effort comes to feel answered. The paper contributes by showing activist feeling is patterned by capital position and embodied history, shaping participation and withdrawal; by foregrounding the internal emotional politics of grassroots groups, where some affective styles are authorised as professional; by conceptualising aspiration as affective practice; and by reading one interview encounter through representational and more-than-representational registers together.