It is with great sadness that T2M shares the news of the passing of Dr. Bradley Rink — a human geographer and mobility scholar, and Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Environmental Studies and Tourism at the University of the Western Cape — who died in April 2026.
Bradley gave a great deal to T2M. He joined our association in 2015 and served on the T2M Executive Committee from 2019 to 2022, co-edited the T2M newsletter, contributed to the blog “View from the Street,” and co-organized annual meetings in 2022 and 2023. He was a familiar and much-loved presence at our annual conferences, presenting in Mexico City in 2016 (“The aeromobile gaze: Tourism ‘from above’ in Cape Town 1932–2016”), Paris in 2019 (“Negotiating the ‘public’ in public transportation: Transgression and normativity within bus passengering in South Africa”), Padova in 2022 (“Airmindedness redux: growing tourism and worldliness through aeromobility in Africa”), and Eindhoven in 2025 (“Walking to the bus: Comparative journeys of young male peer researchers in South Africa and the United Kingdom”).
Those who knew Bradley remember not only an exceptional scholar but a warm and generous colleague — someone as interested in the person in front of him as in the paper they were presenting. He will be deeply missed by the T2M community and by the wider field of mobility studies, which he helped shape with such care. Perhaps it is only fitting that a scholar who spent his career theorising the “aeromobile gaze” — that elevated, all-seeing view he called “tourism from above” — might now be watching over all of us from just such a vantage point.
