A taxi ride contains something fundamental about living together

Few places bring people physically closer without requiring them to meet socially than a taxi. One person opens the door, gives an address and sits down. Sometimes conversation follows. Sometimes it does not.

The bodies may be only centimetres apart, while the social, moral, political and cultural distance between them remains vast. For Sumaya Jirde Ali, that tension became the subject of her master’s thesis on Norwegian-Somali taxi drivers in Oslo.

She wanted to examine the taxi not simply as a means of transport, but as a space where people are assessed. It is an intimate, unequal and time-compressed workplace, she writes, where a driver may be read through a category before having the chance to appear as a person.

Her commentary uses that confined space to consider dignity and the ways strangers encounter one another in everyday life.