Moving Forward or Taking a Stand? Discourses Surrounding the Politics of Wisconsin High-speed Rail

The 2010 launch of a national high-speed rail (HSR) initiative became heavily politicized in some parts of the U.S. Research on HSR, however, has predominantly focused on quantitative variables at the national scale, while the fraught sub-national politics of HSR have been mostly overlooked. Using discourse theory, I explore the politics of Wisconsin HSR, arguing that HSR figured heavily in a larger state-based political struggle over conflicting spatial visions of how Wisconsin ‘ought’ to be. This research highlights the significance of spatiotemporally contingent meanings and the scale of analysis in politics of mobility research.