Research
Research Niche & Innovation
As a human geographer interested in urban environments of the global South, I have over the past several years positioned myself and my research within a specific scholarly niche. My current and future research seeks to investigate the critical importance of movement and stasis in a translocal context. My research also foregrounds student voices, while elevating mundane and subaltern mobilities to make them visible in the everyday movements and circulations of African cities. ‘Mobilities’ is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship concerned with the movement and circulation of people, non-human animals, objects, capital and information. As a central defining feature of modern life, mobility can be understood through its role in shaping the city, and of the lives of its citizens. Thus mobilities are relational, and involve a dialectic between movement and stillness. The ‘mobilities turn’ in human geography reinvigorates our understanding of movement and undermines the long-standing static nature of the social sciences. The development of this niche has been driven by my research but has also been positively influenced by- and reflected in my teaching.
My recent research outputs have been published in the leading journals within the interdisciplinary field of mobilities studies, namely Mobilities and Transfers. Research outputs in these two journals are read by mobilities scholars around the world. My recent publication in Transfers is perhaps the most critical and potentially far-reaching of my recent outputs, as the article was part of a special issue on 'Race and the Politics of Mobility' that was a collaboration with the most senior scholars in the field of mobilities studies. Those authors with whom I share that platform include: Mimi Sheller (editor of the special issue and one of the key scholars of the 'new mobilities paradigm'); Tim Cresswell; and Cotten Seiler. This recent publication bridges a number of disciplines including human geography, anthropology, sociology, transportation studies and critical race studies. The topic of the paper has deep resonance and relevance to the South African context, and thus not only addresses scholarly interest, but also the need for modern urban society to move and live together.
In addition to academic outputs, I have placed my research outputs into the public realm through opinion pieces in publications like the Mail & Guardian where I write about mobility justice.
Mowbray Terminus, 2016 (B. Rink)
In addition to my niche in mobilities studies, I continue my interest in urban change at the neighbourhood-level--which was the focus of my PhD research in De Waterkant, Cape Town. The most recent output from that aspect of my research interest was a 2016 article that contributed to the understanding of how quartering happens. Details of this innovation are described below. Originally intending to work solely under the UWC project Cities in Transition, it is my intention to register a new project by the end of 2016 with a proposed title of Mobilities in the global South that addresses this niche development.
My expertise in mobilities and urban change have been recognized by editors at several leading journals within my field and I have served as a peer reviewer since the start of my appointment for the following accredited journals:
Anthropology Southern Africa (Routledge)
Antipode (Wiley)
Journal on Excellence in College Teaching (Independent)
Mobilities (Routledge) - recognition of my peer review can be found here.
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (Wiley)
Tourism Geographies (Routledge)
Transformation (Independent)
Urban Forum (Springer) - where I was invited as a member of the Editorial Board from February 2015
Urbani-izziv (Independent)
In addition, I have completed peer review for two book-length manuscripts and several chapters for edited collections for the following publishers:
Routledge
Sun Media (Stellenbosch University)
Innovation
The most innovative contributions from my recent research outputs include the following:
Highlighting and humanising subaltern mobilities
My recent publication in Geoforum (2022), entitled ‘Capturing amaphela: Negotiating township politics through shared mobility’ was valued by reviewers as “… a most welcome addition to the paratransit / urban informal sector literature in general” and “…a very interesting paper that demonstrates the value of an ethnographic approach in mobilities/transport research”. The paper represents an important research achievement both due to its method and subject matter. While much of the existing research on public transportation in South Africa (and elsewhere) takes a quantitative approach, this paper, like much of my mobilities research takes an ethnographic approach to the subaltern mobility practice of amaphela [meaning ‘cockroach’ in isiXhosa] taxis—that have received virtually no attention within any discipline. Given the paucity of evidence concerning amaphela, the primary and innovative contribution of this paper is to extend a people-centred approach, to illustrate how amaphela services in Cape Town negotiate harsh social, economic and spatial environments brought on by state regulation of transportation services and apartheid’s inequalities. The research thus allows us to humanise an often-time dehumanising experience of public (paratransit) transportation in the South African context. The research on which the paper is based was made possible by a UWC Senate Research Grant for my registered project Mobilities in the global South [Project registration number: HS17/1/12] and has been augmented by my participation in a Volkswagen Foundation-funded project with colleagues at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (Leipzig, Germany), and fieldwork was fulfilled with help from a UWC student research assistant. The paper appears in a special issue on shared and informal mobility in the journal Geoforum—one of the highest impact journals in the discipline of human geography.
The focus of my PhD research dealt with the concept of quartering in the context of Cape Town. In my article published in Urban Forum in 2016, I provide empirical evidence of quartering (the discursive and material shaping of urban space) in the context of the global South that speaks back to a literature whose primary contexts are Anglo-American. More importantly, I provide a critical theorisation of how quartering happens through the application of discursive and material tropes to the urban fabric of the city. The empirical evidence and analysis adds to previous theories of urban change in the age of neoliberal economic development, in that the conceptualization of quartering that I offer focuses on the tropes of borders, surveillance, spectacle, the body, community, and consumption that act as triggers to actuate the process of quartering. I continue to disseminate these outputs to a broader audience through my blog entitled Quartered City.
New ways of understanding CIDs:
New ways of understanding CIDs: Results from my 2015 article in Mobilities journal theorises the functioning of City/Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) through what my co-author and I call the ‘Human-capital mobile assemblage’. This unique assemblage that we revealed in our research recognises the co-constitution and relative frictions that are present in the intersection of mobile subject and his/her potential to facilitate, attract or transfer capital with movement through the CID. This important contribution advances the conceptualisation of CIDs through the mobilities literature, as highlighted by comments from referees when they note it was:
Invigilating the CID (B. Rink)
…An interesting original article, which offers a new reading of the relationship between the city and mobility through a close engagement with Cape Town. The overall framing of the argument is persuasive from the start, and the authors manage to construct a cogent conceptual problem on the basis of which they bring together their engagements with the city. I particularly appreciated the extension of the discussion of mobility into a new empirical context.
By positioning CIDs in this way, this recent research output contributes to theoretical debates on urban governance, citizenship and belonging through the perspective of mobility.
Innovation in mobile method and context: Mobilities in the global South
The focus of my mobilities research takes place in the under-examined context of the global South while engaging traditional social science methods in exploration of the embodied nature of mobilities through my autoethnographic study of public transportation in Cape Town. Using autoethnographic reflections of six months of everyday bus use in Cape Town (an intellectual project that continues to this day) allowed me to shed light on hidden dimensions of mobility inequality while it also contributed toward filling a gap in empirical evidence on contemporary bus passengering and the continuing role of race in everyday mobility. The work from this research has been published in a special issue on 'Race and the Politics of Mobility' in Transfers. Shortly after its publication, the article was cited by Merriman (2016) in his progress report of mobilities research in the journal Progress in Human Geography. In his progress report, Merriman had the following to say about my work and those of other scholars doing innovative empirical studies:
What these and other important writings on embodiment and mobility individually and collectively reveal is the ways in which mobile subjects are constructed, differentiated, classified, and at times excluded according to social, cultural and physical markers of difference, with such constructions and exclusions operating along lines of gender, age, sexuality, class, nationality and bodily ability, as well as race and ethnicity.
(Merriman 2016: 3)
Collaboration with Open Streets Cape Town
With the support of the WWF Nedbank Green Trust, I joined Open Streets Cape Town in their campaign aimed at increasing awareness of options that reduce the environmental impact of travel. The A to B Challenge Travel Diary Project sought to understand how Capetonians move around the city by keeping a travel diary for seven (7) days. Results from the Project will contribute toward a better understanding of the potential for creating real options that meet people's travel needs. The UWC phase of the project was implemented as part of the Mobilities in the Global South project for which I am principle investigator.
References:
Merriman, P. (2016). Mobilities III Arrivals. Progress in Human Geography, DOI: 10.1177/0309132516635948
Sonic urbanism(s)
I have become interested in the role of sound in shaping the urban form and experience. Along with students from the University of Basel and University of Cape Town we have created a 'sonic map' of Cape Town for further exploring urban soundscapes.