Researching with Proximity: Relational methodologies for the Anthropocene (Arctic Encounters)

✍ Scribed by Outi Rantala (editor), Veera Kinnunen (editor), Emily Höckert (editor)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 229
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This open access book presents a series of speculative, experimental modes of inquiry in the present times of environmental damage that have come to be known as the age of the Anthropocene. Throughout the book authors develop more nuanced ways of engaging with the environmentally vulnerable Arctic. They counter distancing, exoticising, and even apocalyptic imaginaries of the Arctic by staying proximate with mundane places and beings of the north. The volume engages and plays with familiar tourism concepts, such as hospitality, visiting, difference, care, openness, and distance, while expanding the focus from binary and human-centric approaches of hosts and guests to questions of wellbeing among multispecies communities. The transdisciplinary group of contributors share a curiosity about how staying proximate may provide theoretical depth and epistemological openings to attend to current tensions and to diversify the ways we do and enact research. Thus, each chapter provides a methodological experiment with proximity, developing diverse ways of envisioning and storying more-than-human worlds. 

✦ Table of Contents

Foreword
About This Book
Contents
List of Contributors
List of Figures
1 Staying Proximate
Proximatising Research
Staying With
The Chapters of This Book
List of References
2 Inquiring with Hospitable Methodologies
4 October 2018, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
10 October 2018, Tärnaby, Sweden
12 October 2018, Bala, Ontario, Canada
8 January 2019, Tärnaby, Sweden
18 March 2019, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
23 August 2019, Luvia, Finland
15 October 2019, Bala, Ontario, Canada
3 April 2021, Tärnaby, Sweden
13 October 2021, Bala, Ontario, Canada
14 October 2021, Tärnaby, Sweden
15 October 2021, Bala, Ontario, Canada
26 June 2022, Menorca, Spain
List of References
3 Becoming Fragile
Fragility as Uncertainty
Fragility in the Damaged World
Togetherness-in-Difference
Collective Fragility Work
List of References
4 Being Corpus: The Tourist Body as Place, Touch and Departure
Corpus: The Body as Proximity and Distance
‘Finland, Finland, Finland’: Tourist Bodies as Place
Existence Arriving: Corpus and the Proximity of Touch
Departures: an Ontology of the Body
List of References
5 Cultivating Proximities: Re-visiting the Familiar
The Tourist Gaze and Proximity
The Tourist Experience and Serendipity
Cultivating Proximities
Towards a Proximate Gaze
List of References
6 Sensing Morally Evocative Spaces
Embodied Explorations of the Knowing–Caring Nexus
Arriving the Valley
Deciding on a Hike
Changing Outdoor Life
Jyppyrä and Stouraskáidi
The Moskodalen
Methodologies for Investigating the Moral Undercurrents of Mobile Outdoor Lives
List of References
7 Walking-With Landscape
Airy Intimacy
Landscape Narratives
Earthly Narratives
Other-Worldly Intimacy
List of References
8 Following Pollen Mobilities
Pollen Mobilities in the Changing Climate
On Pollen Mobilities and Air Travel
The Hotel Room as a Designed Environment of Tourism
Living-with-Pollen: On Controversial Proximities
Touring with Pollen: Where Next?
List of References
9 Slowing Down with Stinging Nettle
Gathering around Stinging Nettle
Introducing the Concepts
Three Monologues Do not Make a Conversation
Meet the Plant Mentors
Stories from the Nettle Field
Standing on a Shared Conceptual Ground
List of References
10 Made-to-Measure: In and Out of Touch with the Old-Growth Forest
List of References
11 Inviting Engagement with Atmospheres
Two Destinations, Together and Apart
Atmospheres and Proximities of the Anthropocene
Fidelity
Reverberations
Atmospheres, Proximity, and (Re)Imagining Tourism
List of References
12 Composing the Incomprehensible: A Cinematic Inquiry into Anthroposcenic Proximity
Setting the Stage
Making a (S)cene…
Scape (S)cene
In Search of Balance…
Looping Back…
Closing (S)cene…
List of References
13 Suggestions for Future Wanders
Our Propositions
List of References
Index