SPEAKER_02 0:03

Just the image of a flight is almost perfect. So a plane, uh a plane and the airport as a combination. The airport is a place where you go. You um you have a different line for which clerk, which ticket you've booked, or which frequent flyer program you've been successful in. You have a fast track through immigration if you've done well, and you have to stand in a line and be move slowly if you've done not so well. You have a lounge if you've done well, you don't, if you haven't done well, and when you get in the plane, you have more room and a bigger seat and you can sleep, and even more oxygen. There's more oxygen in the front of the plane than there is in the back of the plane, more toilets available per person. This is a metaphor for the politics of mobility, basically.

SPEAKER_04 0:55

And I'm Stephanie Tam.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Welcome to Behavioral Scientist Freeze.

SPEAKER_04 1:03

The podcast that explores what it means to be human through conversations at the intersection of science and culture, and books that illuminate who we are and who we can become. Hey Evan.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Hey Stephanie.

SPEAKER_04 1:24

So this season we are reading Polish author Olga Tokarczyk's Flights, which is a strange and wonderful novel that defies categorization.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

We sure are. And in our last episode, we introduced the novel and the author herself, Tokarczyk's background in psychology, how she got into writing, her childhood in Poland, and more.

SPEAKER_04 1:46

Today we're gonna dive deeper into one of the major themes of the book: movement.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Oh, now we're moving.

SPEAKER_04 1:56

Yes, we are. And if you've gotten past the first several sections of flights, you'll know that movement and mobility actually come up quite a lot. And about 80 pages into my Fitzcaraldo edition, there's this really curious section in which we're presented with a young woman who's giving a lecture in an airport on something called travel psychology. And when I first read that, I was like, what's travel psychology?

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Yeah, I had the same reaction. I mean, I studied psychology. I've been working with psychologists for years, but this is the first time I heard the term, and I was really, really intrigued.

SPEAKER_04 2:35

Yeah. Well, in the book, the young woman describes it to us this way. Ladies and gentlemen, travel psychology studies people in transit, persons in motion, and thus situates itself in opposition to traditional psychology, which has always investigated the human being in a fixed context, instability and stillness. But then she argues, if we wish to catalogue humankind in a convincing way, we can do so only by placing people in some sort of motion, moving from one place towards another. This has meant that for some time in travel psychology, there have been certain prevailing voices claiming that there can be no other psychology besides travel psychology.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

I really love those passages on travel psychology and particularly the the challenge that Tokarczyk throws out there through this lecturer that our starting point for psychology should be that we are people in motion, not people in a place, just a static place.

SPEAKER_04 3:48

Yeah, it's clearly meant to be thought-provoking. And anyway, it made me curious about whether there was actually such a thing as travel psychology, or at least if there were scientists who studied people in transit and tried to catalog humanity through the study of movement. And amazingly, I found someone who does just that.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Good sleuthing, Stephanie. So what did you find out?

SPEAKER_04 4:14

Well, you'll just have to listen on. Before we dive in, let's just share a bit about where we're going with these expert conversations and how they fit into the book club. So our aim is to draw out a key theme or question from the book and then explore it with experts from across the sciences and humanities. In these conversations, we're not necessarily aiming to discuss specific passages from the book, but to use it as a launching point to dive deeper on a given subject. Then, in our group discussions, we can bring together ideas from the book, these expert conversations, and our own thoughts and reactions to figure out what it means and what we can learn from it. Now, let's begin. Today, we're joined by a guest expert who studies the science of how people move and what mobility reveals about our relationship to each other and the world. Like the novel's narrator, who describes herself as rootless, Tim actually has a long and personal history of moving around the world.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

My dad was in the Air Force when I was born in Norfolk. Soon after that, we posted to Berlin, and early years were spent in Berlin during the Cold War where my brother was born. But later we went to Singapore and came back to Oxfordshire to REF Bryce Norton. So going to Singapore was really important because my parents both left school at 16. Dad joined the Air Force, mum trained to be a nurse. We would never have had the life we had if it hadn't been in the military, because parents that leave school at 16 generally don't travel in that way. So at the age of eight, I guess, um I was on a plane and flying first flight I remember, flying to Cyprus and then to the Ghannes, which is in the Maldives, and then to Singapore, because planes didn't fly that far back then and I had to be refueled. And then arriving in this tropical environment that the air and the rain and everything feels different. Like you know how different it is. And and pretty soon my parents were quite adventurous in terms of travelling and uh eating and things like that. They didn't try and maintain a British diet, so quickly found like satay stands and macan stores and all kinds of interesting things to eat, so food became important to me. So I remember that Singapore years as being wild and interesting and exciting. And I remember also coming back from Singapore because I remember it was grey and rainy, and I remember getting a mach uh some milk to drink, and it was full fat milk, and I hadn't tasted full fat milk for ever, really. And suddenly my mouth was coated with fat and it was a very strange taste. So, but I don't remember the kind of more existential. I must have sort of felt it. I must have felt displaced at some point, but I don't remember it. But I what I know has influenced me was always to this day being interested in going to other places and what new places bring, and recognizing that the world is full of different histories, if you like, that everywhere you go, uh you're time traveling as well as space traveling, you're in a different linear and a different development or whatever the right word is, a different history. That something else in the past is different from where you are. So the present is different and the future will be different. So I think spatial traveling is also time traveling, and I find that interesting.

SPEAKER_04 7:54

Yeah, that's fascinating. So, how did you get into the field of geography?

SPEAKER_02 8:00

So, when I was at high school, I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to do a degree in English. And at the time, it was very hard to get into an English degree in Britain, and so I knew I wasn't going to get the A-level results, and geography was supposedly uh easy. And when I got there, uh UCL, just at the beginning of my second year, I did a course called humanistic geography that was transformative. It taught me that the things I thought were interesting about literature and about writing were also potentially part of geography, and so I changed my mind basically. I discovered that geography could be about worlds of meaning and writing and being creative within it, and so I stuck with it. After that, I went to London, went to do my postgraduate degrees in America, in Wisconsin, and really haven't stayed anywhere long uh since then. I think the longest I've ever lived anywhere is seven years, and the longest job I've had is this one in Edinburgh, which is just past seven years on July the 1st. So, yes, I've led a peripatetic life.

SPEAKER_04 9:08

Oh wow. Yeah, well, it's probably good to actually talk a little about what geography is because I think to the extent that many people are familiar with it, I think there is a strong association with the study of place. And that's that is part of it, but there's also clearly more. So um I'd love to hear from you what is missing from this paradigm of geography as simply the study of places.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

Well, one thing that's different is that is to change that description, just take the S off places and say the study of place. So so one version of geography is that is like there's lots of places in the world, let's think about them. And and that's an honorable exercise. But to say it's a study of place is to change that focus slightly and think about well, what is it that they all have in common? Like what is place? Which is a much more philosophical question, one that wasn't really asked by the discipline until the 1970s. And it was precisely that question that was written about in a book, uh book called Space and Place by my who became my supervisor, I Fu Twan, in Wisconsin. And so one thing geography is, to me, it is the study of geographical facts, if you like, geographical parts of life and how the role that they play in who we are and how we relate to other people, and indeed how we relate to the world beyond people, the physical world too. Second answer to your question is as well as being the study of place, geography is also the study of moving. And so this is an even more recent development in the discipline, in a way, which is that to think of geography as the study of place is to fall into what in very jargonistic conceptual geography terms is called sedentarist metaphysics, which means basically that we think of things in fixed ways as fixed in space. And that means that things that aren't fixed become suspect and difficult to deal with. The most obvious example is you think of people as belonging to places. Um, most often we think of them as belonging to nation states. So you're British or you know, whatever country you choose. And once you start thinking in those terms, then anyone who exists outside of that, that could be a foreign person in another land. So it could be a tourist, a traveler, or an immigrant. It could be someone that travels more or is identified with travel more, such as a gypsy traveler, or a traveling salesman, or a jet setter, or a refugee. All of these people become complicated people. They become people that don't fit into the idea that people belong in place, and so therefore out of place. And how do you deal with that?

SPEAKER_04 12:03

Yes, yeah, that makes sense. That kind of leads on to I was also going to ask, what is mobility studies?

SPEAKER_02 12:08

Sure. So around about 2000, people in different disciplines, but I would say the first primary people were in sociology, um, John Early in particular, and Mimi Scheller, um, developed the idea of what they called a new mobilities paradigm, which is also called a mobilities turn and has become mobility studies as it's become more entrenched. And the idea for this was in precisely what I was just saying, which is that disciplines think of things in fixed terms. So John Eury talked about sociology as traditionally the study of societies, and a society was a fixed and bounded thing, this society and that society. And what he argued was that what this ignored was both the incredibly modern prevalence of movement in a, you know, post-modern or post-postmodern hypermobile world that's globalized, and it effectively black boxed or put into a kind of, we're not going to ask any questions about this kind of mode, anything that that didn't fit into that. Um, similar things were happening in anthropology. James Clifford uh wrote a book, um, Roots, which is kind of opposed to roots, well, roots with a U as opposed to roots with two O's. It's been a pun in mobility studies for a quarter of a century now. And every time we say it, we unless we have a Canadian accent, we have to say it and spell it out. And so, what happens if you start thinking of the world in terms of roots, roots rather than roots? Yeah. And that's the kind of starting point is what if we start from things that move rather than starting from things that are fixed? How do we see the world differently? That's what mobility studies is.

SPEAKER_04 13:49

That's a the the roots versus roots is a great pun as well, in terms of thinking about how to encapsulate that paradigm shift as well, or the evolution from place to mobility. Um I'm curious because I guess when people think of the sciences, at least this is very uh very simplistic, but they often think of the scientific method. So things like the randomized controlled trial, hypotheses, experiments, and to say geography is a science. I'm curious what kind of methods geographers employ to gain knowledge about the world.

SPEAKER_02 14:24

Yeah. Yeah, I think um it can anthropology might make a claim to this, I suppose, but I think geography is the discipline that has the widest range. So I'm in a school of geosciences where some of us are geographers and some of us are earth scientists. Um so that's even wider. But the the far end of physical geography is essentially uh science of the natural world, the physical world. Um, and it can be people studying how individual grains of sand move in a riverbed. Or, you know, it's very scientific. There isn't so much of the natural of the kind of you know, um, controlled experiment with the control and the you know, all that kind of thing that you might do in a lab. That's more field science. So it's people outside it, so it's a bit more like ecology or something like that. And it moves all the way through the social sciences to the humanities and and the and the arts too. So there's only one of the most exciting bits of um of geography at the moment is core creative geographies, and it's people playing around with all the different ways you can express human relationships to planet Earth. That that is the definition that my supervisor gave of geography was the study of Earth as the home of people.

SPEAKER_03 15:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 15:40

And it's both the earth and it's the people, but really it's about home. So it's people on one end, earth on the other, but it's the home bit that's interesting. It's how do we make this place a home?

SPEAKER_01 15:49

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 15:49

Uh is and I kind of like that. I mean, it has maybe a few problems about how some people are excluded from home, but that in itself is interesting too, right? It's uh if you think about it that way, then it becomes interesting. So the methods that we use range from there are a few labs, there are labs for sure, but they're also field science. There's um there's more statistical kinds of I have health geography colleagues who do loads of mass statistical exercises on health, which is not dissimilar from a lot of people working in public health. There's um more social science-y kind of ethnographic, talking to people, partistant observation, being in the field and meeting people and observing, and then there's archival historical geography, which is really like a historian would work. And then there's just sort of mag like I am, basically just a magpa. I just collect stuff and try and write convincing narratives that people are either believe or don't believe about something that makes something make sense, which is much more like uh, I don't know what's that like. It's like a I suppose it's somewhat like a journalist, which is a somewhat disparaging term in academia, but um but I don't mind it. I like journalists, good ones. Good long-form journalism, I really like.

SPEAKER_04 17:02

Well, me too. Uh it's that's what I aspire to. I love the I love the idea of a magpie too. I don't know if you're familiar with the um fantasy author Philip Pullman. Yes, of course. He has said that his spirit animal as a writer is uh is a magpie, collecting things from different fables and stories. And yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:21

Oh, I love that. I mean, I love Philip Pullman and I I want to share the magpie, and there aren't enough animals for everyone to have their own, so I think we can share.

SPEAKER_04 17:29

Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things you talk about uh in in your work is mobility as not just a neutral concept, but one that carries a whole politics to it. So, you know, what are the politics of mobility? And can you give us some everyday examples that illustrate that?

SPEAKER_02 17:46

Sure. So, first of all, one of the things that thinking of things starting with mobility changes is uh a general suspicion of mobility. So there are all kinds of pathologies of mobility, I guess you would call them. You know, if we know from the Bible, the curse of Cain, you're you're cursed to wander around the world forever. It's often seen, it has been seen in Judeo-Christian societies as a curse. And I believe in other societies too, that wanderers or people that travel are often um thought of as somehow cursed and in an in a position where of loss and and lack and not belonging. Our story of how civilization developed. Civilization is related to the word for culture, and the word for culture is related to agriculture. And that was all about that humans were nomadic, and then they stopped being nomadic as they became civilized. They they ploughed the earth, and then uh they had a surplus and they got cities, and then they didn't need to travel anymore. They didn't need to move around the world looking for food, for foraging. They could grow their own and they could herd cattle and things like that. And so we have a very big story about who we are, which is about we are people that stopped having to move in some way. More recently, you can think, and there's all kinds of people that are deemed as suspect, and now that, of course, the predominant group that um we talk about is migrants or refugees or asylum seekers, and all of the negative conversations or negative narratives about uh these people, uh, a part of unfortunately uh the modern condition in the West. So, to back off from that slightly, one of the scholars that's influenced me is a sociologist called Zygmunt Baumann. And Zygmunt Baumann was interested in what modern society was like and wrote metascale analyses of what he called liquid modernity. And so you might gather from the word liquid, central to that was the idea that the predominant value of our time is movement. And this was quite a change in the sense that when we think about hierarchies, we've traditionally thought about a social hierarchy as being something to do with our address. So if we think of a city, if I think of Edinburgh, I think of where I live, Collinton or Morningside or various other places of Edinburgh as good addresses where people who've done well live. And then there are other parts of the city that have been stigmatized uh where you, you know, you know any any city you'll know this. This is familiar. But what Batman was arguing is we can do the same thing by how we travel. Just the image of a flight is almost perfect. So uh a plane, uh a plane and the airport as a combination. The airport is a place where you go, you um you have a different line for which clerk, which ticket you've booked, or which frequent flyer program you've been successful in. You have a fast track through immigration if you've done well, and you have to stand in a line and be move slowly if you've done not so well. You have a lounge if you've done well, you don't if you haven't done well, and when you get in the plane, you have more room and a bigger seat and you can sleep, and even more oxygen. There's more oxygen in the front of the plane than there is in the back of the plane, more toilets available per person. This is a metaphor for the politics of mobility, basically.

SPEAKER_04 21:03

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 21:04

And that is a map, a kind of map of a map of society. Society is like that, and it and they're related. The the slowness of the people in the slow lane is related to the people being speedy in the fast lane. Because if you have limited space in an airport and limited resources for staff, you're taking some staff and putting them in the fast lane, you're taking some of the space so you have different corridors for fast lane to be going. So everybody in the slow lane moves a bit slower. And so that's also part of the metaphor, is that in society, when you move fast, you slow people down. So maybe an even better example is uh high-speed rail being introduced in American cities or highways being introduced in American cities in the 50s and 60s, often meant that um the neighborhoods, which are often black neighborhoods, were cut off from each other. Uh, and these highways would connect areas of relative wealth at the same time as houses were being demolished, were predominantly lower class poor. Of people, predominantly people of colour in American cities, very famously, like uh in Chicago, where the where they deliberately avoided the mayor's house and a very wealthy white area and dissected black areas, which not only black people couldn't use as much, but also the actual road itself was a barrier. It was as well as being a way of moving, it was a way of immobilizing because it stopped the connections between things, because not every road in the old neighborhood had a tunnel under it. So it slowed people down. Um, and this happens all over society from commuters, migrants. There are there are whole realms of super citizens that can travel around the world easily, regardless of their actual citizenship, and just you know, get into these sort of tunnels of elite experience and move along these tunnels into, if you like, capsules of elite experience in often gated environments and posh hotels. And it doesn't matter who where they're from really anymore, where other people who are citizens cannot have, you know, are frequently stopped. So you can think about the stopping of people of colour, particularly black drivers in America, or who appear to be of Middle Eastern origin in Britain. All of these things are examples of that. And so I developed this uh in my recent book, The Citizen and the Vagabond, to talk about these ideal figures. So a citizen, again, it's this figure that can move easily without hindrance, and both within a territory, because if you are a citizen of a country, then you should you can move around it freely in a non-authoritarian state anyway, and across boundaries. So that you if you have a passport that says you're a citizen of X, then you you you you're allowed to move across most boundaries in the world and not be hindered unless you've broken the law. You know, if you look at the front of your passport, it says something like that. Allow you to travel. Whereas another figure that's also mobile is the vagabond. So the vagabond is this figure from the medieval period. Uh in the 14th century onwards, as feudalism started to break down, people started to become more mobile because they were released from the bonds of the Lord and they appeared in cities around the world. And suddenly there were some people who would turn up and they had to start developing ways of figuring out how to look after them because charity had worked based on you belonging to a place. You owed charity to people who were for where you were from, but you didn't owe it to people who were not where you were from. So they started to to give people like passes that were the origins of passports, little tickets that said you you are eligible for charity. And if you didn't have it, then you would. And then eventually people who kept asking for it but didn't have, weren't supposed to have it, would get branded. In Switzerland, they would be branded. And it's just like a mark that said, don't give them any money. It was like a, I don't know, I call it primitive biometrics, but it was it was a way of sorting people. And then this became more and more over time so that you ended up with a nation state and the passport system, and and that was you know, it sort of came from that starting point of how do we tell people who belong and people who don't belong. And the the people that don't belong were the vagabonds, and there were vagrancy laws all over Europe and then American the Americas, all over the world, in fact. It was used by colonial administrators too to decide who was worthy and who was unworthy. And so I use that as a metaphor in the Citizen and the Vagabond to think about how different aspects of mobility divide us along these um this continuum from a sort of free-flowing agent to uh someone that's either forced to move or forced or stopped from moving, but not of their own volition, which is the vagabond.

SPEAKER_04 25:38

I had no idea that was the history of the passport. That's kind of mind-blowing. Well, I mean So it was actually that people it was actually a charity concept that you there were certain people who were entitled to care.

SPEAKER_02 25:51

It's a um I mean, it isn't the only part of the history, there's more to it than that, but it's a significant time when a document was developed for some people to be able to get arms, and also other kinds of documents that were there to stop you from getting arms. So, yes, it was about it was about the sudden increasing fluidity of society. If your society was becoming more mobile from a very fixed period in European history where the vast majority of people didn't move very far. And so there were exact there were exceptions, like when there's a big drought or disaster, when there's a mass movement of people. But everyday life for most people was being where they are and staying where they are.

SPEAKER_04 26:34

Yeah, that's really fascinating. I I feel like you actually anticipated two of my questions, which one of which was how the figure of the citizen shapes and in some ways helps us helps us to rethink our ideas of belonging and and borders.

SPEAKER_02 26:49

The citizen has a history of geographies, but in the West it was um uh associated with the ancient cities of Greece and Rome, where where you could belong, you could be a citizen of the city, and that was the space that you belonged to. And it was always defined against people that didn't belong. And so that included then at least enslaved people, women, children, um, and anyone outside. Um, and that included the barbarians, and the barbarians were the people that you know didn't belong even to Rome, and they they were outside of it. And that notion of the citizen dissolves as the Roman Empire disappeared, and then in medieval times you started to get this idea of uh the citizen as belonging to towns. So in the German tradition, you have the the burger burger, and the burger is it belonged to the berg, which is the town, and so merchant cities began to have this sense of freedom about them because the merchant class was expanding, and of course they had to move because that was trade. So there was a phrase in medieval Europe: the the city air makes men free. Because you could escape the bonds of feudalism, and you if you could sort of escape and be away in the city for a year and a day, I think it was, then you could become a burger or a citizen and you were free, you could move around that city and um to a certain degree other kinds of freedom as well. That would have been true in you know in medieval uh Europe right through the 15th, 16th century, and then the emergence of what we now know as the nation-state, the passport system was very recent, it was uh really didn't reach its pinnacle into what it is today until the 20th century. But the nation-state really emerged full-fledged in the 19th century. Uh, you know, countries we think we know now, like Italy, didn't exist as Italy, or Germany didn't exist as Germany until very recently. They were sets of like principalities and um other kinds of mini-versions of nation-states. So then the citizen becomes a citizen of the nation-state. But there is an emerging sense of that breaking down as we reach a more fluid world. So there's the idea of a citizen of Europe, right? Uh people talk since Immanuel Kant about the idea of being a citizen of the world, a cosmopolite, which is doesn't have any legal standing, but is an idea. And that is one of the ideas that everyone that people on the right are getting very angry about right now is is there is no such thing as a global citizen. If you're a citizen of nowhere, then you know, if you're a citizen of the world, then you're a citizen of nowhere. And who wants to be from nowhere? Sure. And so the the local is becoming important again. Um, so that's the genealogy of that idea of the citizen. And now, you know, there are these sort of super citizens who almost doesn't matter where they're from because they're so wealthy they can just move easily across the world in various ways.

SPEAKER_04 29:42

Yeah. Yeah. It's a really interesting how that that concept and that figure is is almost defined by relationship to that other specter of the vagabond that you talk about. And um how that's kind of evolved over time to relate to the concept of being out of place.

SPEAKER_02 30:00

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean that was I mean, the citizen in ancient Roman Greece was was always defined in relation to this the enslaved person and the people outside of the city. It doesn't make sense as a category without an outside. The outside makes it. Um, and so that became much more the vagabond as the vagabond was invented as a as a kind of character in or that term, the vagrant and vagabond became terms in uh medieval Europe and then spread, and that would then become the I mean because often vag vagabonds are literally citizens of somewhere. Like if you have a a homeless person in Britain in the 18th century, they were still from Britain or from you know Derby or wherever they happened to be from, but um but they were defined as something something else. They were defined as not quite a citizen. They were they were the the poor but not the worthy poor. They were people that that that these stories began to develop of these are the people that might come to your back door and threaten your your wife, right? So there were all these sort of narratives, and it was always that in those days. Um those narratives of threat associated with them. And so, yes, the Vagabond became this figure from I'd say the end of the 14th century onwards, that quickly was this the part of moral panics, and there were laws all over, you know, the vagrancy laws were introduced, which are still used today to stop protests and things like that, traveled through empire into the Americas, and a a huge body of law that makes a huge list of crimes which hardly know why they're a crime, all in one kind of law. So the basically it becomes a law of identity. You can't be a vague vagabond or a vagrant.

SPEAKER_04 31:47

Yeah, it's really interesting. It's interesting too how you can kind of trace the evolution of this figure as a figure and concept over the ages and throughout different places. Because of course, as you mentioned, one of the narratives we have now is the sort of indigenous or nativist identity versus the migrant identity. And they're also defined, you know, in opposition to each other, who belongs and who needs to leave. Um, so you know, this is we're also doing this book club on Olga Tokarczyk's novel Flights, and uh at the center of almost right in the middle of her novel is this story that has the figure of this runaway woman who belongs to this religious sect that practices movement as a way to ward off evil. Um, and it's actually the title of the novel in the original Polish. Um, I'm probably not gonna say this correctly, but Baguni, which translates into something like runners. And there's this interesting moment where she and another woman who is running away from her domestic life, basically, are apprehended by the police and one is released while the other is written up for disturbing the peace. And it almost feels like the perfect example of some of the dynamics you're discussing around the citizen and the vagabond and how some forms of mobility are celebrated while others are condemned. I'm I'm just thinking like, what determines whether movement is seen as a sign of status and stability versus something that is stigmatized and suspicious?

SPEAKER_02 33:21

It's a really good question. And of course, I've probably focused more on the negative stories about mobility when we've been talking, and but it's always balanced by the positive ones. So you mentioned gender, so also the case that women moving. I mean, one of the case studies I wrote about in um On the Move uh in 2006 was about early drivers when women started to be allowed to drive and the scandals and what people thought that they weren't rational enough, women couldn't drive, and it was also going to drive their bodies crazy in some way, and they'll get hysterical. And suffragists, people who were um who were trying to win the vote started to use cars a lot. They started to drive around with no male driver, um, with flags and things, and you started to use it as a strategy. And this is a story we've we could has been repeated a million times over, is that uh a kind of technology or infrastructure that allows movement to happen, creates a certain kind of dominant structure, but at the same time makes possible its undoing. You know, you can think of it on a smaller scale with protest now for against fossil fuels. People can just block a road and it becomes this huge symbol of um, you know, of protest. Um and so what has become interesting. So your question is I would so I would generally answer and say that that mostly the vagabonds become marginal, people are otherwise marginalized, so racially, through gender, uh also through class, and any number disability for sure, that's a big one. Other forms of marginalization. And I wouldn't just say that this politics mobility reflects those divisions, I would say in the contemporary world it's instrumental in producing them.

unknown 35:00

Interesting.

SPEAKER_02 35:00

Stopping people and letting people move, or and then making stories about how people move, though the narratives involved with it, uh have become instrumental in producing contemporary hierarchies of power. You asked me about what geography was. I think geography is the study of things that are instrumental in the production of these hierarchies, and mobility is one of them. And now, of course, we start to get privileged people being, you know, also um so what the reason it's a complicated answer is that certain kinds of privilege are now being scapegoated for their mobility, uh, in that sense that global cosmopolitan elites are mobile, and they they are part of the problem according to this more nativist tradition in politics.

SPEAKER_04 35:45

Yeah, that's really fascinating. Um there was another question I had a little while back, which is that the book also refers to these lectures on travel psychology. And when I first read them, I was like, what it what is travel psychology? It's not something I'd encountered. And so yeah, I was curious if that's if travel psychology is something you're either familiar with and or what you make of this concept.

SPEAKER_02 36:10

So I think it's fictional, and I think I would know by now if there was a travel psychology. But that isn't to say there isn't, you know, psychologists have engaged with travel. I mean, that's a different thing, rather than it being a subfield. There's a whole history of um psychologies of various forms of movement. Um, so we could talk, for instance, about the diagnosis of fugue. A fugue state is a state where someone finds themselves somewhere and didn't know how they got there and doesn't really know who they are. Or sometimes they remember who they are but don't know how they got there. So they're kind of like a large version of sleepwalking. And um, the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking wrote a book called Mad Travelers about this diagnosis that was a formal diagnosis in, you know, diagnostic manuals, right up until recently. And it was kind of invented at the same time as tourism was becoming prevalent and vagrancy was a problem in France. And so, and so there was this whole what he calls like an ecosystem, an ecology of mobility that was new. And so there became this um diagnostic of uh a kind of worrying travel, a kind of travel that was psychologically determined in particular ways. Um, another example of this sort of pathologization of travel or making it in diagnostic, is and this is gonna this goes back to your runaway women um observation from the novel, is that is that runaway slaves were diagnosed, they were, I can't remember the name of it, but there was a particular diagnosis um which was that they had some psychological problem. Not that they were enslaved in horrible conditions and they were trying to find freedom, which is the obvious answer, but they had a psychological flaw, a diagnosis of a certain kind that explained it. Um and and I mean there's so many. George Beard was a doctor in 19th century America who wrote uh who wrote a book uh called Neurasthenia. And the neurasthenia was a diagnosis of um a kind of overwhelmingly uh sort of a sort of overwhelm of 19th century life. So it seemed very familiar to us now, talking about, you know, how can we slow down and disconnect and have our attention not be all about uh social media and things like that. But at then he said that people were being were being driven kind of crazy by steam power and the telegraph, like communication and steam engines were um between them, uh, producing this kind of uh people couldn't keep up anymore with life. It was too fast that timetables existed, and and they were going a bit kind of distracted and crazy from it. Um early forms of train travel are full of like diagnoses that are somewhat just medical and sometimes psychological. Um people believed that people would have their hearts would stop over 30 miles an hour. Um, there were discussion of women's uteruses flying out of their body if they went too fast. Um it was just, yeah, horrible images. Um, and so there's a whole history of psychologists, and I'm sure that's true today as well. I'm sure psychologists know that there are diagnoses um that are related to travel and attention and the speeded up world. Um, and it's certainly true in popular culture. You know, we think about um all the ways in which our world of um on-time production, being able to go anywhere we want very quickly and quite cheaply, uh having attention having our attention on our phones all the time, that whole world of a hyper-mobile world is starting to be heavily diagnosed. And how we deal with it and live with it is something that, although I'm familiar with similar things from the 19th century, is clearly different in some ways in the 21st century. So I don't think there is uh a sub-discipline called travel psychology. I don't think there's anyone advertising for jobs for travel psychologists, but it's remarkably close to mobility studies. It feels like she was. I felt seen when I read about it in her book.

SPEAKER_04 40:17

Excellent. It's always good to feel seen. Um, so I mean, you know, you kind of mentioned this, but your scholarship is actually quite interdisciplinary. And I mean, you're also a poet. So, you know, what inspires her poetry and how do you relate it to your work as a geographer?

SPEAKER_02 40:32

Yeah. So I think um when I I mean, I've written poetry since I was a kid, uh, sometimes more and sometimes less. And I had inspirational English teachers at school, like I said at the beginning of this conversation. Um, but it was I think it was my version of a midlife crisis in 2008, instead of buying a sports car. I signed up, I signed up for a uh a poetry workshop basically that was run by Faber and Faber, the publisher called Becoming a Poetry.

SPEAKER_01 40:58

Much more affordable.

SPEAKER_02 40:59

Much more affordable, but it was expensive still. Uh because they got a very cheap, very old sports car, maybe. Um, but um uh so there were 12 people. I didn't think I'd get in. There were 12 people in this room, and we were visited by the kind of Illuminati of um British poetry, and it was a more it was an amazing experience. It was like to take something seriously and learn again. I loved being a student when I've been a teacher for so long, and so the craft of it became something I was just took me away from my job, and I just thought this is something else I will do. But needless to say, after a while it became clear that the things I was writing about were not that dissimilar from the things I write about in my academic life. Forms of belonging and not belonging, forms of moving. There's I have so many poems about airports, it's not true.

SPEAKER_04 41:42

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_02 41:42

Like animals and plants and other things that are not quite where they're supposed to be. So, like I have a poem called Erratic, which is about rocks that are in places they didn't originate from, and the word for that is an erratic. So you find like a limestone rock, a boulder in an area that is mostly associated with sandstone or granite, and like how did it get there? And often they were moved by water or you know, long time ago by ice or some other way. And so this was interesting to me poetically. So I wrote, and also the word erratic is related to the word error, and it's also related to the word wanderer. And it's interesting that wanderer and error have the same roots, and so again, you come back to this idea of mobility as a as an error in the system. And so I wrote a poem about uh an erratic, a rock, that thinks through some of these things. So I like different writing challenges as well as different disciplinary challenges, and so they all work together in interesting ways.

SPEAKER_04 42:39

That's great. So Tokarczyk talks about her novel as a constellation. And I wonder if that's something that you think about in your poetry and your work when you're assembling and thinking through form and movement.

SPEAKER_02 42:54

Absolutely, yeah. Um, one of the interesting things to me is that the Greek word topos, which is a word for places or places, um, topoi, I guess, is place places, um, is also the word for a kind of rhetorical form. So in Aristotle, he wrote about uh the importance of having the right form, rhetorical form, for whatever it is you're arguing about. Um, so obviously that you know there are tragic forms and comic forms and all that kind of thing. Um, so one of the things that's interested me is how um in the book Flights, but also in Walter Benjamin and other writers, a form matches how we think about place and how we think about movement. I I always link it back to Walter Benjamin, who is a German philosopher who has died on the border of trying to escape to Spain and basically killed himself because he wasn't going to escape the Nazis. He was Jewish. And he, his arcades project was a big project he's writing about Paris, and it exists as a series of files that that are they are in what they Called convolutes, which are like files, and their theme, like photography or wandering, but they're still very fragmentary. They're little quotes he's collected like he would in a commonplace book or in his own observations, and it's great. Walter Benjamin also used the word constellation a lot. That was his term to think about a kind of structure that's not a structure, that it's a pattern that emerges from the past into the present and has this kind of shocking value or exploding value. So I think in flights, that idea of a constellation as a kind of montage or fragment form is a perfect way of thinking about travel, because travel is often about unexpected juxtapositions. Travel has a kind of list-like quality. It's one thing after another in space. And that produces new sparks new ideas. And so writing writing in the way she does about travel in this fragment form, this constellation, as she calls it, which I can't believe isn't derived from Benjamin. It must be, is is perfect. And I do that too. So I think about poems as a kind of place on the page. A way a poem looks is a combination of both the words and the white space. Like in in prose, the white space isn't important. In poetry, it's really important.

SPEAKER_01 45:46

That's beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 45:48

And so I've been in my latter life at least, I've been thinking about how to write in a way that makes more sense that way. And in poetry in particular. And I really like the way um it exists in flights. It's been inspirational.

SPEAKER_04 46:01

Yeah. One other thing we're doing uh for our guests is so Tokarczyk has these three travel questions she mentions, which in some ways you can actually interpret quite metaphorically, but are also literal travel questions. So, you know, where are you from? Where are you coming in from, and where are you going?

SPEAKER_02 46:18

They're great questions for a traveler. And they, in the context of sitting at my desk at home, they're slightly more metaphorical. But um where am I from is a is a difficult one. Um for the reasons we talked about at the beginning, it is a question that um my kids get visibly uncomfortable with when they're asked it because it involves many parts of an answer. So I am I'm definitely English. I'm I was born in Cambridge, and when I was born, uh in my paternal family history, my the Creswell, my dad's immediate, you know, 400 years of Creswell male Creswells had been born within about 65 miles of Cambridge. But I've never lived in Cambridge, like, and I've lived all over the world. Um, so I can't, there's no easy answer to the question. So my kids, it's even worse to some degree. I mean, they some of them were born in Wales, one was one was born in America, one and uh two were born in Wales. Um uh but they're you know, they're British dual or dual citizens, they live in different parts of the world now. Um yeah, it's a really complicated question. Where are you from for me? And and certainly I know that it's uh it has a certain I mean it has a a different emphasis when it's asked or to people who appear to be from elsewhere, right? So when someone asks you where you're from, they probably mean something different when they ask me.

SPEAKER_04 47:46

Which I get asked all the time in Norwich. Yes, in fact. And then it usually goes, where are you really from?

SPEAKER_02 47:53

Yeah, exactly. That's the second part. Yeah. Um so there's that. So where where am I coming in from? Well, you know, I mean, I came into this it to be at home after my afternoon walk. So I was I have a walk after lunch every day because I'm in a kind of off time for teaching. So I um I try and get my steps in. So I came in from up the water of leaf, walk down the down down the river and came into this room. And um where are you going? Um, well, my hope is that this is where I will live until it's impossible for me to live here, you know, when I get too old to live here. So I've lived this life moving around all the time, and uh part of me wants to discover what belonging to somewhere lives, and I'll never really properly be able to do it because I probably haven't got long enough left, you know. But um I know people from my first job onwards who live in the places that they still live in the places where I knew them. And if you go visit them, particularly in Wales, where I had my first full-time permanent academic job, there's still people there and they are like part of the landscape. They know everyone and everything, and everyone knows them. But I'm I'm now trying to embrace where I am and writing about it. That is my project. My project at the moment is to write about how people become local, how they thoughtfully invest in where they are in ways that are not, you know, exclusive, xenophobic, and exclusionary, if possible.

SPEAKER_04 49:22

And yeah, I I I'm aware, you know, we've covered a ton of ground in our conversation. And I wonder if listeners went away with just one or two insights or questions. What would you most hope that they take away from our time together?

SPEAKER_02 49:39

I would like people to think about the ways they move and and how the ways they move are different from the ways other people move, and if the ways they move impact how other people move and how they might move differently. Like, how would you move differently in the world if the world was more just? So, I mean, I've always liked uh the Rawls' ideal model, you know, this idea of justice is if at random you were born into a society, what would society would you want to be born into? So there's no guarantee you're going to be the best off or the worst off. And so if you apply that to a mobile society, what kind of society would you want to be born into in terms of the way it moves? So many of the ways we move now impact other people. If if you if we take a flight, we're carbon emissions when we could take the train, it impacts other people. You know, and often the people that impacted most are people who can least afford to be impacted. So I think that's important. And then I suppose the the the reverse of that is how can you properly live locally? What does that mean? To live where you are, to be here.

SPEAKER_03 50:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:52

You know, here is a word that literally changes depending on where you like it travels with me. If I say here, it moves with me. It literally means something different every time I move it's somewhere else when I say here, if I'm somewhere else. Very few words in the English language do that. Um if you invest in here, then then what does it mean to to be here as opposed to moving? And and how can you best do that? So they're they're big philosophical geographical questions, maybe a bit much for people, you know, over their breakfast or whatever.

SPEAKER_04 51:29

No, those are great thought-provoking questions. I'll be thinking about them for a long time. Thank you so much, Tim.

SPEAKER_00 51:39

Wow, Stephanie, you weren't kidding when you said you covered a lot of ground. I don't think I'll look at the lines and lounges in an airport the same ever again. And the idea that a road can both help people move but also immobilize them. Or how throughout history people have been defined by where and how they can or cannot move. Citizens, slaves, vagabonds, merchants. This all complicates our ideas and assumptions about movement, and it was a fascinating conversation to listen to, and it all feels very Tokarchuk-esque.

SPEAKER_04 52:14

Yeah, and he's a poet, too. We're actually gonna share the poem he talked about, Erratic, in our show notes, so do check that out. It's very cool.

SPEAKER_00 52:24

Terrific. Well, that's all for today.

SPEAKER_04 52:35

Evan, what's our discussion question this week?

SPEAKER_00 52:39

So, we want to know what's a time you were traveling, commuting, or on your way somewhere when something unexpected happened and it completely changed your course. So, what was the thing that unexpectedly happened, and where did it end up taking you? Let us know. We look forward to hearing from you. This episode was produced, edited, and mixed by Stephanie Tam. Our theme music was composed by Nina Humphreys. Thank you to the Coneman Treesman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy at Princeton University for sponsoring Behavioral Scientist Reads and helping to make the podcast possible. You can subscribe to Behavioral Scientist Reads on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. You can also find us at behavioralscientist.org and our dedicated book club website, bookclub.behavioral scientists.org, to discover all our episodes, extra material, and leave feedback. Don't forget to rate and review the show. It will help other people discover the podcast. See you next time.