An Interview with Tim Cresswell

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

PA (Peter Adey): Firstly, I’d like to say thank you very much for agreeing to talk to us. I thought we were going to start off talking about something that has inspired the Academy of Mobility Humanities (AMH), and this journal, which is in relation to Pearce and Merriman's book and special issue of Mobilities (2017), “Mobility and the Humanities.” One of the interesting things they highlighted was a counter version of the way that the new mobilities paradigm and mobility studies could be constructed. They question the more social science driven origins, and present an alternative history to the new mobilities paradigm. Obviously, knowing your work very well, I wondered how you saw that kind of history?

TC (Tim Cresswell): I think that until I saw that reference to an alternative history, I did not think that was necessary as a construct because, for me, I think that the way mobility and mobility studies became prominent was through the humanities. I never considered that it was anything other than that. And so, as they note in the paper, when I write about such things, I tend to note that thinking about mobilities connects the social sciences, the humanities, and, indeed, the arts. When I think about where my inspirations were, before the new mobilities paradigm paper and before John Urry's book, Sociology Beyond Societies (2000), there was work being done in a of number of fields, including anthropology, critical theory, philosophy, and literary studies that focused in one way or another on mobilities. So if you look at Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes(1992), you could say the only reason it’s not mobilities work was because it wasn't identified as such. It was clearly starting to talk about these ideas of transculturation and moving between things. And James Clifford was talking about living between sites, not focusing on one place as an anthropological piece of work but living across the routes with a “u” rather than roots with the two “o”s. In philosophy, there were all the works that were
happening under the guise of postmodernism that cantered fluidity and the nomadic. Even in sociology, if you read a book of Zygmunt Bauman, you can call that social science or you can call that Humanities. The same is true of John Urry (Tourist Gaze, Sociology Beyond Societies, and Mobilities). If you read Mimi Sheller’s work, it is as much informed by the humanities as it is by social sciences. When I hear reference to the social sciences, I tend to think of something a bit more reductive than it needs to be. I think of a more empiricist, slightly more quantitative tradition that still tries to maintain the word “science.” But there is clearly the interpretive social sciences which overlap with the humanities. In my own work I think that all my trajectory of thinking about mobility is inspired by the Humanities or what would be recognised as humanities, including creative arts and literature.