Jointly organized by the Asia Research Institute and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore.
CHAIRPERSON
Assoc Prof Weiqiang Lin, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
How fast does a person or thing move? Velocity, or speed, is a valuable resource and the subject of considerable cultural investment. Speed (and slowness) are implicated in the construction of kinetic hierarchies separating the citizen from the vagabond. Being able to get somewhere quickly has traditionally been associated with exclusivity. Even in air travel – where, since the demise of Concorde, all classes of passenger travel at the same speed – those “high up”, as Zygmunt Bauman would put it, are able to pass smoothly through the airport to the car that has been parked in a special lot close to the terminal. In airports frequent business travelers are able to sign up to the fast-track schemes through which they can access the fast lane of immigration. This frees up immigration officials to monitor the slow lane of foreign arrivals who are not frequent business travelers. Speed and slowness are often logically and operationally related in this way. And it is not always high velocities that are the valued ones. Consider the slow food and slow culture movements. How bourgeois can you get? Who has the time and space to be slow by choice? The lockdowns during COVID showed us how slowing down for those of us lucky enough to be able to work from a safe and secure home was dependent on the speeding up of the work of key workers in health care or food delivery for instance. This talk, part of a wider project—The Citizen and the Vagabond—explores the role of speed in the lifeworlds of citizens and vagabonds and in the creation of hierarchies of mobility.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Tim Cresswell is Ogilvie Professor of Geography at University of Edinburgh. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on the role of space, place and mobility in social and cultural life. He has PhDs in Geography (Wisconsin) and Creative Writing (Royal Holloway, University of London). He is also a widely published poet with three collections – most recently Plastiglomerate (Penned in the Margins, 2020). Recent academic books include: Maxwell Street: Thinking and Writing Place (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Moving Towards Transition (co-authored, Zed Books, 2021), and Muybridge and Mobility (co-authored, University of California Press, 2022). His book The Citizen and the Vagabond is due to be published by the University of Minnesota Press in Spring 2026.
