Mobilities in Remote Places explores the meanings, challenges, and opportunities of remoteness as practiced and experienced by those who live and work in some of the world’s most remote communities.
As mobilities around the world proliferate in countless forms, the meanings of remoteness undergo significant change. Places once considered impossibly distant have appeared to become closer, more accessible, and less distinct from global centers of geopolitical power. But instead of disappearing altogether, configurations of remoteness evolve, manifesting themselves through new possibilities, new challenges, and new insecurities. Drawing from a variety of case studies from around the globe, the contributors of the book examine remoteness as an outcome of evolving mobility constellations. Rather than defining remoteness as an absolute or objective time–distance condition, the book shows how remoteness is a practice, experience, and representation that is situated, relational, and emergent.
This collection of original and thought-provoking chapters will be of interest to students and researchers in the humanities and social sciences with an interest in mobilities, place, and human geography.
1. Mobilities in remote places: introduction
Phillip Vannini
Part 1: Rhythms
2. Making remoteness through pandemic im/mobilities on the Isle of Coll, Scotland
Christina Bosbach
3. Lavorare dal Sud: return to Southern Italy and remote work in pandemic times
Flavia Cangià
4. Cards, memories and places: exploring remoteness and place in rural Denmark
Claus Lassen, Lea Holst Laursen, Ole B. Jensen, and Max Frank
Part 2: Routes
5. From trade corridor to dead end?: Eastern Afghanistan as a remote borderland
Tobias Marschall
6. Bigsy vs the Mice: tiny airports flying in the face of a compromised fate
Lyn Gallacher
7. Mobilities on the margins: the becoming of Melrakkaslétta as a tourist destination
Þórný Barðadóttir, Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson, and Katrín Anna Lund
Part 3: Speeds
8. When the road came: remoteness, mobility and social change among youth in Kaasa, Ghana
Lina Adeetuk and David Butz
9. Where media technology is not fully available: sound-based means of transport as local media
Maria Alice de Faria Nogueira and Rosiane dos Santos Souza
Part 4: Frictions
10. The immobilities of non-automobile residents of rural Spain
Luis Camarero, Jesús Oliva, and Julio A. del Pino
11. Moving Patagonia: contemporary rural dwelling through estancias, puestos and puesteros
Pablo Mansilla-Quiñones, Paola Jirón-Martínez, and Walter Imilan-Ojeda
Part 5: Feels
12. Slowness, sense of community, and changing perceptions of mobility in Tajikistan’s Bartang Valley
Suzy Blondin and Sultonbek Aksakolov
13. Ancient paths, new forms of movement in the Peruvian Andes
Indira Nahomi Viana Caballero
Part 6: Motives
14. The lure of immobility: living and coworking in rural France
Nathalie Ortar and Aurore Flipo
15. Mobilizing and practising remoteness in Iceland’s Westfjords
Anna Wojtyńska, Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir, and Pamela Innes
16. The groundhog trail: the geographies of habitat and daily life for mobile workers at the Romaine River hydroelectric site
Laurie Guimond and Alexia Desmeules
Biography
Phillip Vannini is Professor in the School of Communication & Culture at Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC, Canada. He has conducted research on BC Ferries, off-grid living, small island cultures and communities, natural heritage, everyday life, the cultural aspects of the human senses, food and culture, and sense of place. His latest research project examines natural heritage and wildness and has resulted in the books Inhabited (2021) and In the Name of Wild (2022) as well as the award-winning documentary film Inhabited. He is the author of Ferry Tales (Routledge, 2012) and Doing Public Ethnography (Routledge, 2018) and co-author of The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture (Routledge, 2011), Off the Grid (Routledge, 2014), and Wilderness (Routledge, 2016). He is also editor of The Cultures of Alternative Mobilities (Routledge, 2009), Non-Representational Methodologies (Routledge, 2015), and The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor of Body/Embodiment (Routledge, 2006), Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Culture (Routledge, 2009), and Popular Culture as Everyday Life (Routledge, 2015).