Week 9: Who is asked to wait

Waiting as a distribution rather than an experience, and the queue as an instrument of state and market power.

27 April 2027

This is the lecture where the course stops being about interfaces. Waiting is not evenly distributed, and the distribution is not an accident of demand. It is produced, and it can be read.

Auyero spent years in welfare waiting rooms and argues that what the poor learn while waiting is the opposite of citizenship. Schwartz got there in 1975 from sociology, treating delay as a marker of relative standing. Neither of them is talking about a spinner, and both of them are talking about your Intervention.