Routes Conversation on Mobilities
Wednesday 5 February 2025
Join us for a fantastic Routes Conversation with Professor Tim Schwanen and Dr Arthur Vandervoort.
A Routes - Migration, Mobility, Displacement seminar | |
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Date | 5 February 2025 |
Time | 16:00 to 17:00 |
Place | Zoom |
Event details
This event brings together in conversation two exciting speakers on mobilities for what promises to be a terrific event – everyone is welcome!
Professor Tim Schwanen will be speaking on the topic of transport injustices and how to deal with competing claims.
Interventions and initiatives to discourage private vehicle use in cities, including clean air zones, low traffic neighbourhoods and many 15-minute city proposals, are increasingly challenged on the grounds that they are unfair and unjust, even if the schemes’ protagonists tend to believe reducing vehicle use will make urban transport more socially just. Academic research on transport and mobility justice is flourishing more than ever but struggles to respond adequately to claims that schemes to reduce vehicle use are unfair and unjust. This is in part because that research has insufficiently considered the dialogical character of many claims about transport injustice. In this talk I begin to outline an approach for how transport and mobilities scholars might respond to the coexistence of competing claims about the in/justice of interventions and initiatives to discourage private vehicles in cities across the global North.
Dr Arthur Vandervoort will ask ‘What do we do with all this data?’ – the role of data-intensive methods for transport and mobility justice in cities.
Transport planning and research are increasingly tasked with the goal of achieving social justice, as demonstrated by initiatives like CIVITAS and TEN-T in the EU. However, this field has long been critiqued for its heavy reliance on technocratic, rational actor models and neoclassical frameworks, which often fail to capture the nuanced realities of individual and community needs. These critiques point to a fundamental tension: while data-intensive methods and large-scale models have the power to drive efficiency and policy decisions, they can simultaneously marginalise other forms of research—particularly those that are qualitative and context-sensitive—thereby limiting the overall capacity of transport planning to effect genuine social justice.
With this in mind, I want to explore what place there is for data-intensive research in transport and mobility justice. I will do this by drawing on a combination of Mimi Sheller’s notion of Mobility Justice, together with a relational view on what constitutes scientific data (as developed by Sabina Leonelli). I will use these two sources to understand what ‘data’ are, and what role they play in facilitating transport and mobility justice. I will also present a tentative typology of transport justice-based research and interventions, in the hopes of encouraging a discussion on transport justice, mobility justice, and the role of data-intensive research in developing them.
Speaker biographies
Professor Tim Schwanen:
Tim is Director of the Transport Studies Unit, Professor of Transport Geography in the School of Geography and the Environment, and also a Supernumerary Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford. He obtained a PhD in human geography in 2003 at Utrecht University, the institution where he also obtained his undergraduate degree in geography. He joined the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) at the University of Oxford in March 2009 and held various research and teaching position since. He became the TSU's Director in 2015 and has been a full-time research professor since 2021.
Tim was a Visiting Professor in Human Geography at the School of Business, Economics and Law of the University of Gothenburg in 2016-2019, and held a Francqui Chair at the Faculty of Sciences in Ghent University in 2022. Since September 2021 he has been a Fellow of the Academy for Social Sciences.
Tim's research uses the geographies of transport and mobilities as entry point into larger questions about just transformations, the climate crisis, technological change, urbanisation, governance and knowledge creation. He has led many research projects financed by diverse funding agencies, including ESRC, EPSCR, Innovate UK, various national research funding agencies across Europe, and the European Commission. He has just completed a study about just transitions in electric mobility and is leading an international project on 15-minute city experiments focused on the question how the promotion of diverse cycling practices in low-density suburbs can help to make cities more just.
Dr Arthur Vandervoort:
Arthur is a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Denmark’s (DTU) Climate Economics and Risk Management (CERM) and Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) sections. He completed his doctoral studies in 2024 at the University of Exeter’s Environmental Intelligence CDT, where his doctoral thesis ‘A Kilometre of Power: Gender, Mobility, and Measurement in São Paulo’ focused on applying a feminist lens to the effort to map and close gender gaps in mobility using the São Paulo origin-destination survey. More recently, Arthur’s research as a postdoc has focused on measuring the relationship between wellbeing of Copenhagen’s residents and their mobility patterns, with the aim of identifying sequences of transport-related climate adaptation policies that maximise wellbeing over time. His research interests include transport and mobility justice, feminist data science, science and technology studies, and gender-based mobility differences.
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Meeting ID: 915 8455 9446
Password: 955829