Situated road safety: uncertain mobility and grassroots road aid infrastructure on Kolyma roads, Russia

Road safety policies often prioritize injury and crash prevention. However, this Euro-American approach—rooted in a liberal tradition of negotiating wounding, responsibility, and agency—overlooks diverse challenges posed by global neoliberal transformations of road safety. Drawing on feminist epistemology, this article introduces the concept of ‘situated road safety’ to capture local responses to perceived road risks. It demonstrates the potential of this approach by ethnographically examining how road safety is locally enacted in Russia’s northeast margins, where the postsocialist neoliberal restructuring of automobility—through reshaping settlement geography, mobility patterns, and social relations—turned uncertainty about the availability of timely road aid during winter travel into a generative force in road safety innovation. I focus on grassroots road aid infrastructure that developed in response to these challenges on Kolyma roads, and particularly on emergency communication cabins, which serve as a material form to bracket this uncertainty.