1st Edition

Mobilities in Remote Places

Edited By Phillip Vannini Copyright 2024
    244 Pages 21 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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).