How did you come to choose your research topic?

I was just beginning my PhD in the fall of 2018 when the newly re-elected coalition government in Luxembourg (where I live) announced plans to make all public transportation in the country free to use. As I had previously researched public transport in the United States during my MA studies, this naturally grabbed my attention, but ultimately it was the public debate around the policy that drove me to explore it further. While many people expressed excitement about the “value” that the new policy could bring (for users, for the environment and for the national brand), others – including representatives of local transport workers’ unions – argued that fare abolition could provoke a “devaluation” of transport services and transport labour. Some critics invoked a Luxembourgish expression, “Wat näischt kascht, dat ass och näischt” – “That which costs nothing is also worth nothing”. This got me thinking about the different meanings people ascribe to value, which has long been a subject of critical investigation in anthropological theory. The concept of devaluation, however, has received much less attention from anthropologists, so I also wanted to explore how this case study could shed new light on that. 

Ultimately, these tensions between different ways of conceiving value, and between value and devaluation, are at the heart of my research. At the same time, I am very interested in the anthropology of work and the study of everyday mobilities, and this research topic allows me to bring these two fields of research together. 

Can you describe your thesis questions and the methodology you use to approach those questions?

I focus on examining how diverse actors – public transport users, transport sector workers, legislators, the Luxembourgish public, etc. – understand the value of (fare-free) public transport and transport labour. At the same time, I look at how some people see these services and jobs as being devalued with fare abolition, as well as other ongoing and imagined transformations such as increasing digitalisation in the transport sector.  

To address these questions, I primarily draw from ethnographic research methods, including interviews with stakeholders and participant observation – observing norms, practices and relations in public transport spaces. I also look at discourses and representations of public transportation in Luxembourg, from folk songs to museum expositions to contemporary news and social media. Public transport fares were officially abolished in Luxembourg on March 1, 2020 (with the exception of first-class compartments on trains and some cross-border transit services); so my field research, which lasted from late 2018 to late 2022, captures the periods before and after the transition.

One of the most exciting parts of the research for me was shadowing accompaniment personnel from the national railway (CFL) on the job. Before fare abolition, they had been responsible for selling and controlling tickets on board trains, along with a variety of other tasks. When I conducted my field research with them in 2021, their commercial and fare enforcement roles were greatly diminished, and my interlocutors were experiencing and navigating this transformation in a variety of different ways.

What are your major findings?

Ultimately, I argue that the question of “value” in relation to Luxembourg’s transition to FFPT is about far more than the presence or absence of a two-euro fare and I advocate for decoupling the notions of “price” and “worth”. While most railway accompaniment personnel feel that they still produce the same value in their work, many recount feeling like their work is now valued less by the broader public in part because the tasks that they perform are less visible from the outside. Several of them also lament a decline in social contact with passengers following fare abolition and some feel that they have lost their status as authority figures. In this sense, the refrain “That which costs nothing is also worth nothing” is a red herring, because the feelings of “devaluation” described by transport workers are largely social rather than economic. 

On the other hand, FFPT brings new forms of value for other stakeholders. Many users, of course, benefit from the financial savings as well as the removal of discipline due to non-payment. In this way, the policy can be seen in the framework of what Mimi Sheller calls “mobility justice”. At the same time, however, fare abolition also serves a nation branding campaign pursued by the Luxembourgish government, which is designed to boost the country’s image and ultimately accumulate value in an economic sense. 

What could be the social and/or political implications of your thesis?

With FFPT policies increasingly being implemented and debated around the world, my research provides a real-life case study of the social implications of fare abolition, illuminating dynamics which are often overlooked. The experiences of transport personnel, for example, are often excluded from debates and analyses of the impact of FFPT but they are a very important piece of the puzzle that ought to be considered by the legislators, urban planners and transport agencies designing these policies. It’s not just about whether or not workers keep their jobs but also what kinds of psychological and social implications these changes can bring. 

Looking beyond the world of transport, this research also speaks to broader questions around the future of work. In a global context of increasing digitalisation, automation and “Uberisation” the experiences and concerns of railway accompaniment personnel shed light on how people adapt to transformations in their work and what kind of social reverberations they have.

What are you doing now or going to do?

This fall, I will be starting a postdoctoral research position at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven on the interdisciplinary COLLAB project “Making Migrant Voices Heard through Literature: How Collaboration Is Changing the Cultural Field”. I am looking forward to embarking on this new project, which will allow me to return to field research and to continue exploring questions related to mobility, work and value in a very different context. 

*   *   *

On 3 May 2023 Sonja Faaren Ruud defended her PhD thesis in Anthropology and Sociology. Assistant Professor Umut Yildirim presided the committee, which included Associate Professor Filipe Calvão, Thesis Director, and Professor Noel B. Salazar, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. The thesis is available to members of the Graduate Institute on this page of the Institute’s Repository. 

• Sonja has just published an open-access article based on the results of her thesis in Anthropology of Work Review: “Giving Up Control: Devaluation of Railway Work in Luxembourg’s Fare-Free Public Transportation System?”.
• Visit also her blog at https://livingmovingluxembourg.com.

Citation of the PhD thesis:
Faaren Ruud, Sonja. “Price versus Worth: The Value and Devaluation of Public Transportation in Luxembourg before and after Fare Abolition.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2023.

Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.
Banner picture: part of an image by Jiaye Liu/Shutterstock.com.