Professor Bradley Rink
Department of Geography, Environmental Studies and Tourism
Contact details: brink@uwc.ac.za
Bradley Rink (PhD, University of Cape Town) is a human geographer and Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Environmental Studies & Tourism at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). His interest in mobilities research and teaching is grounded in the social aspects of movements and circulations in African cities. His recent outputs have been published in leading journals within his field including Mobilities, Transfers, Journal of Geography in Higher Education and Tourism Geographies as well as various edited collections. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Urban Forum (Springer Nature), principal investigator for the UWC-registered project Mobilities in the global South, and sits on the Editorial Boards of Mobilities and Journal of Urban Mobility. He is one of the founding members of UWC’s Migration and Mobilities Interdisciplinary Collective in Africa (MMICA) and the African Urban Mobilities Network and serves the Association of the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T2M) as an elected member of the Executive Committee. He is the recipient of the 2017 CHE-HELTASA National Excellence in Teaching and Learning Award, and the 2021 Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Wiley Digital Archive Digital Research Fellowship.
In addition to his ongoing research project Mobilities in the global South, Bradley is part of an international team awarded funding through the Trans-Atlantic Platform (T-AP) for Social Sciences and Humanities for a three-year project entitled Impact of COVID19 on livelihoods, mobility and accessibility of marginalised groups (ICOLMA). The interdisciplinary project will explore and compare the impact of the COVID19 pandemic on the mobility, accessibility and livelihoods of marginalised groups in Cape Town (South Africa), Ruhr Area (Germany) and São Paulo (Brazil) through a mixed methods approach in order to understand the changing roles of physical access for urban marginalised groups in pandemic and post-pandemic times. He is also South African Project Lead for a Volvo Research and Education Foundations (VREF) funded project entitled Investigating Young Men’s Experiences of Walking to the ‘Bus’ in Low Income Neighbourhoods of Cape Town and London: A Comparative Study Built Round a Community Peer Research Methodology (Project number EP-2022-WK-01). In this project the project team seeks to understand how young men navigate their walking journeys in urban areas with high rates of crime and poverty.
Relevant publications:
- Rink, B. & Maskiti, B. (Forthcoming) Learning from cockroaches: How amaphela taxis can influence sustainable mobility transitions. Mobile Lives Forum, Southern Diaries.
- Rink, B. (2023) Review Essay, They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria and Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency:The Routes of Terror in an African Context, The AAG Review of Books, 11(3), 36-39,
- Rink, B. (2022). Capturing amaphela: Negotiating township politics through shared mobility. Geoforum, 136, 232-241.
- Rink, B. (2022). Public space on the move: Mediating mobility, stillness and encounter on a Cape Town bus. Urban Studies, 0(0).
- Rink, B. (2022). Cultures of flying and low-cost carriers in Southern Africa: Accessible air travel for all? In W. Lin & J-B Fretigny (Eds.), Low-cost aviation: society, culture and environment, pp. 83-97. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
- Sarmento, João and Rink, Bradley. (2022). Africa Tourism. In: Jafari, J., Xiao, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Tourism. Springer, Cham.
- Rink, B. & Crow, J. (2021). Horse/power: human–animal mobile assemblage in the contemporary city. Contemporary Social Science, 16(1), 84-95.
- Rink, B. & Grobler, L. (2021). Connection, Place, Transit: Airport Atmospherics and Meaning-Making at Cape Town International Airport. In: C. M. Rogerson & J. M. Rogerson (Eds.), Urban Tourism in the Global South, pp. 113-128. Cham: Springer Nature.
- Rink, B. & Klaas, L. (2021). Flying, health and the city: sensing aeromobility and risk in an informal settlement. Cities & Health, 5(1-2), 198-209.
- Rink, B. (2020). Mobilizing theory through practice: Authentic learning in teaching mobilities. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 44(1), 108-123.
- Ramsawmy, S., Rink, B., & Anderson, P. (2020). Rural and gated: Narratives of lifestyle migration to Grotto Bay Private Residential Estate, South Africa. South African Geographical Journal, 102(1), 77-96.
- Rink, B. (2019). Place ballet in a South African minibus taxi rank. In D. Agbiboa (Ed.), Transport, transgression and politics in African cities: The rhythm of chaos, pp. 81-98. London: Routledge.
- Rink, B. (2017). Mobile heterotopia: Movement, circulation and the function of the university. Kronos, 43(1), 137-151.
- Rink, B. (2017). Sojourn to the dark continent: Landscape and affect in an African mobility experience. In N. Doerr & H. Taieb (Eds.), The romance of study and volunteering abroad: Affect in the experience of border-crossing, pp. 93-113. New York: Berghahn Books.
- Rink, B. & Gamedze, A. (2016). Mobility and the city improvement district: Frictions in the human-capital mobile assemblage. Mobilities, 11(5), 643-661.
- Rink, B. (2016). Race and the micropolitics of mobility: Mobile autoethnography on a South African bus service. Transfers, 6(1), 62-79.
Related Projects
The ICOLMA research project seeks to develop a more holistic understanding of how the cities of Cape Town, São Paulo and the Ruhr area surrounding Dortmund, Germany have been affected differently by the pandemic, government policies and the diverse coping mechanisms that have been adopted particularly by the marginalized groups.
The VREF ‘Walking to the Bus’ project seeks to understand how young men navigate their walking journeys in urban areas with high rates of crime and poverty.
The MiFOOD Project is focused on the neglected interactions between migration and food security within the Global South.
Related News
In October 2023, UWC and MMICA hosted the International Symposium on Migration and Mobilities in partnership with the “Migration and Food Security in The Global South: Interactions, Impacts, and Remedies (MiFOOD Network)”.
In March 2024, at the recent inaugural African Transport Research Conference, Bulelani Maskiti and other team members from UWC, Durham University, and Transaid UK, presented research findings from the 2023 VREF-funded project, “Young men’s daily mobility needs and practices in two low-income neighbourhoods of Cape Town: Reflections on first mile experiences, using an innovative community peer research methodology.”
Prof Bradley Rink and project colleagues from the University of Cape Town, the Technical University Dortmund (Germany) and the Federal University ABC (Brazil) who are part of the Trans-Atlantic Platform (T-AP) for Social Sciences and Humanities funded project “Impact of COVID19 on livelihoods, mobility and accessibility of marginalised groups” (ICOLMA) took part in the third project workshop in São Paulo, Brazil.
Building from the 2023 VREF-funded project, Prof Bradley Rink along with an international team of scholars and activists from UWC, University of Durham (UK) and Transaid (UK) were awarded funding for 2024 from the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (VREF) for a one-year project entitled “Investigating Young men’s experiences of walking in secondary cities: A comparative study of walking in South Africa and the United Kingdom.”
In March, UWC hosted a visit by group of postgraduate students and team members from the International Planning Studies Research Group at TU Dortmund, Germany. The visit formed part of a workshop for the “ICOLMA” project- The Impact of COVID -19 on Livelihoods, Mobility and Accessibility of Marginalized Groups.