News

It is with great pleasure that I address you as the new president of the Association.  Since 2011, I have been actively involved with T²M, serving as a member, part of the executive committee, and chair of the local organizing committee for the 2021 annual conference. I am looking forward to this new chapter as president. T²M is currently in a strong position, both academically and financially, due to the effective management of our former president, Carlos. My goal is to continue the positive trajectory established by Carlos and previous presidents, ensuring that T²M remains a leading, welcoming, and inter-disciplinary forum for the study of transport and mobility history. That’s why one of my first acts as president was to meet with all the former presidents. I know I’ll probably face some of the same challenges they did, so getting their insights was very helpful. While T2M is thriving, I believe we can always do better. One area where I see significant room for growth is increasing the representation of scholars from the Global South, especially from the African context, who are often underrepresented at our conferences.  I’m committed to developing support measures to ensure our African colleagues can share their valuable expertise and knowledge with us. I’m also eager to broaden the range of T²M’s events. While our annual conference is a highlight, I believe we can do more to foster engagement and discussion with smaller venues like workshops, lectures, and book discussions.  I’ll be in touch soon to encourage you to organise such events and help expand T²M’s reach and impact To amplify T²M’s reach, I’m also prioritising a stronger presence on social media. We’re currently searching for a social media manager to lead this effort. If you’re interested in stepping up or know someone who would be a great fit, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Another goal I had hoped to pursue was the amendment of T²M’s statutes. However, this would involve certain costs, and I’m currently evaluating whether this is the best use of our resources at this time.  I’ll keep you informed of any developments on this front. Last but not least, news about this year’s annual conference is coming soon. Stay tuned for more details. Thank you for your continued support of T²M. I’m excited to work with you all in the coming years.   Best wishes, Hugo  

When exactly does it start? How far into the future do the multiple legacies of profound change endure? With an end of the covid-19 pandemic in sight, and recognising the significant uneven geography of its effects, I write this message against a background of news media reports around the world on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By 2 March 2022, the UN reported that over 675,000 people have crossed the Ukrainian border into Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova. They have done so in fear for their lives and seeking safety. ‘Prior to this 2022 crisis’, the UN Refugee Agency reports, ‘almost 3 million people were already facing humanitarian need in Ukraine, including 850,000 internally displaced Ukrainians and 5,000 refugees from other countries.’ The very constitution of Europe, the return of the latent fears of nuclear war, and historical comparisons between Russian artillery strikes and the Battle of Britain have been cited as a means of making sense of the narrative of the conflict of which we are witness to unfolds. The 2013 T2M conference crossed the border between Finland and Russia, with proceedings starting in Kouvola and ending in Saint Petersburg. The theme of the conference was Transport and Borders. Transport, Andrey Vozyanov remarked in his conference report, must accommodate ‘the fact that the world is full of borders […] borders are sometimes what mobility needs – to boost new ideas and developments.’ What new ideas and new developments might emerge out of the current crisis in Ukraine is a hopeful prospect; a counterbalance to the human tragedy escalating there every day. The theme Disruptions and Reconnections of the 2022 conference jointly organised by T2M and the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and Humanities (MoHu) of the University of Padua, gives us a fitting opportunity to reflect on the meanings, reasons, factors and legacies of moments of crisis. Crises which include those affecting nearly everyone as the covid-19 pandemic has, and crises somewhat localised and instigated by the prospect and reality of war. What is a disruption to some, may escalate to become a tragedy to others. Forced reconnections inspired by selective readings of the past may ignite the kind of unity that was previously unthought. Our annual conference, which in 2022 aims for a hybrid online and in-person format, provides a fitting forum to reflect on whether and in what ways do moments of crisis have entered our lives, and including the role that transport and mobility may have played in them. Raising the question of what disruptions and which reconnections take shape in the process is a powerful analytical lens to reflect on where crises fit into history and our future. The T2M team, the local organising committee of the University of Padua and the MoHu Centre, look forward to receiving your contributions to this year’s conference in whichever format suits. Collective reflection is always welcome and it feels that, against the events of the past 2 years including the first quarter of 2022, there couldn’t be a more fitting time to insist that we all do. With all best wishes, Carlos López Galviz Lancaster University, UK.   10 March 2022

If you do, a new short survey from the Journal of Transport History wants to find out more about what you teach, how you teach it – and what might be useful in terms of future support and resources! We’d love contributions from across the world, and across our field. It doesn’t matter if you consider yourself a transport & mobility historian or not, if you teach in a History department or not, or if it’s a whole course, single module or even a single seminar – if you’re teaching on topics which look at transport or mobility in the past, then we’d be keen to find out more. We want to use it to think about how teaching is an important part of our field and where it might help build career progression – perhaps we traditionally think more about research, but all researchers start somewhere, and very often that’s in a taught session that inspires us to go further. So, do please fill the survey in here: https://tinyurl.com/bmy69bu6 Hopefully it will enable us to feature more teaching-related content in the Journal of Transport History, and to give more support for university-level teaching of transport and mobility history. Our thanks in advance to you for filling out the survey! Mike Esbester

On behalf of the John Scholes Prize Committee, I’m delighted to announce that this year’s Prize winner is Ioannis Limnios-Sekeris, a 3rd-year PhD student in the Department of Political Science and History at Panteion University, Athens. We unanimously awarded the Prize for his paper “A Multifaceted Business: International Migration and Transport Sector amidst the Cold War”. The paper links a number of areas with global transport history in an innovative way, including histories of migration, politics and business. It explores the role of the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM) from the 1950s through to the 1980s. It addresses Cold War politics and the responses of the USA and its allies´ to migration, eventually supporting national transport actors and their flag-carrying providers. We can see how the ICEM drove particular modes of transport – but was itself subject to pressures from nation states and the transport interests. Congratulations to Ioannis! The prize consists of 200Euros in cash from the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility and £150 of book vouchers from SAGE, the publishers of the Journal of Transport History. We will work with Ioannis to revise the paper and put it through the peer review process at the Journal of Transport History, with a view to publication. Several entrants to past years’ competitions have in this way been published recently, with 2 more articles to be published in the coming weeks. Our thanks to all entrants, the Prize Committee (Anne Ebert, Mike Esbester and Massimo Moraglio), and the prize sponsors. The 2021 competition is now open, and we warmly encourage you to consider submitting.

We have sadly lost our esteemed colleague John Urry, who died on March 18th. John gave so many of us the spark of curiosity that led to our interest in mobility studies. He had a unique way of synthesizing diverse fields and starting new conversations. His modest brilliance opened up new avenues of thought and new insights, without insisting on any school of theory or disciplinary limits. Through his kind encouragement and searching questions he helped so many students grow into better scholars, and set sail to so many new careers. We will miss him deeply as a caring teacher, a collaborator, a colleague and friend.  

John’s deeply historically informed perspective on mobilities has advanced new agendas across a whole array of diverse fields, including transport history and transportation studies. Its impact is still rippling outwards, from his early work on spatial theory and tourism studies, to his recent interests in climate change, complexity, and social futures. Now that seam of productivity comes to a kind of an end, but not the energy that it contains and the many sparks that will continue to fly off of it.

 John Urry’s funeral is taking place on Monday April 4th at 2.45 in the Lancaster and Morecombe Crematorium. This will be followed (from 4pm) by the sharing of memories at the Midland Hotel Morecambe, where it is intended not only to mourn but also to celebrate his life.

 An inspiring page of tributes is being gathered by Lancaster University at this memorial page. He will be in our thoughts and continue to influence our work for many decades to come. T2M will honour John’s life and his work at our upcoming conference, as we continue with the boundless project of mobility studies which has brought so many of us together.  

Mimi Sheller

President, T2M  

We welcome Irene Anastasiadou, Carlos Lopez Galviz, Julia Hildebrand, Robin Kellermann, Victor Marquez, Hiroki Shin, M. Luisa Sousa, and Dhan Zunino Singh to the Executive Committee and congratulate them on their election. Read More

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