President’s Page
November 2011
the Annual meeting in Berlin ended already one month ago, this time with a run ahead impressive summerschool. Attendance of both events and the atmosphere were superb.This year, we had many participants at the conference, who were not giving a paper. T2M conferences obviously have become a must for experts in historical mobility studies. As in former conferences, we attracted many new and young scholars from different disciplines. At the same time, we are appealing for destinguished and very senior capacities. I see this as a sign for the growing importance not only of our association but of our field and research style. The summerschool on “the passenger, driver, flaneur, voyager, hiker, pedestrian and biker”, funded by Volkswagen Foundation, brought 27 Ph.D. and early Post-Docs and 16 lecturers from all continents to Berlin for a most intensive and methodologically inspiring exchange from early morning up to late night. Breaks and free time should be longer next summerschool.
The focus on transport and mobility on display this time brought many museums curators to the conference. I hope that we can keep the close ties in the future. It is good that we will meet in the coming years in large museums too, 2012 in Madrid (National Railway Museum) and 2013 in Kuovola and St. Petersburg. A problem of the conference was the growing number of no-shows. I see two reasons for this sad development: visa problems and financial problems. There has to be a visa consultant at local organizing committees in the future, we have to enlarge the number of travel grants and we have to devolop some kind of punishment for scholars, who don’t show up although they have registered. We at least can expect an information well in advance.
The venue, the Deutsches Technikmuseum, was a stimulating place to discuss transport and mobility on display. We were made feel at home by our colleagues (thank you!). Evaluation shows that the walks to some of the seminar rooms were a bit long but turned out to be a communication chance too. The noise level in the conference room sometimes was a bit high. The rather smal seminar room at the Center for Technology and Society of TU Berlin for the summerschool enforced a physical closeness which welded the group together, which meanwhile forms a facebook group (www.facebook.com/groups/T2Mbootcamp/137124746390031).
I am very thankful to the participants and sponsors and especially to the colleagues, who prepared both meetings: Alfred Gottwaldt, Heike Wolter, Joseph Hoppe, Sabine Krick, Charlott Skarupke, Adnan Ahmad, Tiziana Zugaro, Manuel Zirm, Carina Stein, Massimo Moraglio, Martin Schiefelbusch, Gunter Heinickel, Sasha Disko, Philipp Wolf, Behrang Alavi, Olaf Zerrenthin, Benjamin Albrecht and the colleagues from program and advisory committee (Dirk Böndel, P.K. Goel, Ian Gray, Peter Norton, Javier Vidal Olivares, Jørgen Burchardt, Joachim Breuninger, Anne Ebert, Kilian Elsasser, Bernhard Graf, Wolfgang König, Kurt Möser, Ralf Roth, Helmuth Trischler, Richard Vahrenkamp, Christopher Kopper), the two invited speakers Steven Lubar and Otto Wachs and the participants of the round table discussion (Steven Lubar, Michael Fehr, Dirk Böndel, Dominick Pisano, Andreas Pinkow, Andreas Braun, Charissa Terranova and Jenni Korjus).
We are approaching the end of the year, which hopefully will bring some days of rest, reflection, recreation and reunion with families and friends to all of you. I wish you all the best for these days and for a fruitful year 2012.
yours Hans Dienel
