Phillip Vannini

This chapter introduces the subject of the book: mobilities and immobilities in/of remote places. Beginning with a basic definition of remoteness, the chapter goes on to conceptualize remote not as a physical condition but as a relational outcome of mobility constellations. More precisely, remoteness is approached as a tension between overlapping dynamics that simultaneously make it and unmake it. Remoteness is thus the emergent outcome from the interaction between the connections intended to extinguish it and the disconnections-either intentional or unintended-that end up reproducing it. From this perspective the focus shifts to understanding how a place and its residents practice, experience, and

Publication Date: 2023

Publication Name: Mobilities in remote places

Research Interests:
Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Social Geography, Mobility/Mobilities, Tourism mobilities, and 2 moreMigration mobilities and Mobilities

People are key elements of wild places. At the same time, human entanglements with wild ecologies involve extractivism, the growth of resource-based economies, and imperial-colonial expansion, activities that are wreaking havoc on our planet.

Through an ethnographic exploration of Canada’s ten UNESCO Natural World Heritage sites, Inhabited reflects on the meanings of wildness, wilderness, and natural heritage. As we are introduced to local inhabitants and their perspectives, Phillip Vannini and April Vannini ask us to reflect on the colonial and dualist assumptions behind the received meaning of wild, challenging us to reimagine wildness as relational and rooted in vitality. Over the three years they spent in and around these sites, they learned from Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples about their entanglements with each other and with non-human animals, rocks, plants, trees, sky, water, and spirits. The stories, actions, and experiences they encountered challenge conventional narratives of wild places as uninhabited by people and disconnected from culture and society. While it might be tempting to dismiss the idea of wildness as outdated in the Anthropocene era, Inhabited suggests that rethinking wildness offers a better - if messier - way forward.

Part geography and anthropology, part environmental and cultural studies, and part politics and ecology, Inhabited balances a genuine love of nature’s vitality with a culturally responsible understanding of its interconnectedness with more-than-human ways of life.

Publication Date: 2021

Publication Name: McGill-Queen's University Press

Research Interests:
Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Social Geography, Wilderness (Environment), Conservation, and 7 moreHeritage Conservation, Ecology, National Parks, Wildlife Conservation, Social and cultural geography, Natural Heritage, and UNESCO world heritage

The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video is a state-of-the-art volume which encompasses the breadth and depth of the field of ethnographic film and video-based research. With more and more researchers turning to film and video as a key element of their projects, and as research video production becomes more practical due to technological advances as well as the growing acceptance of video in everyday life, this critical volume supports young researchers looking to develop the skills necessary to produce meaningful ethnographic films and videos, and serves as a comprehensive resource for social scientists looking to better understand and appreciate the unique ways in which film and video can serve as ways of knowing and as tools of knowledge mobilization.

Comprised of 31 chapters authored by some of the world’s leading experts in their respective fields, the book’s contributors synthesize existing literature, introduce the historical and conceptual dimensions of the field, illustrate innovative methodologies and techniques, survey traditional and new technologies, reflect on ethics and moral imperatives, outline ways to work with people, objects, and tools, and shape the future agenda of the field. With a particular focus on making ethnographic film and video, as opposed to analysing or critiquing it, from a variety of methodological approaches and styles, the Handbook provides both a comprehensive introduction and up-to-date survey of the field for a vast variety of audio-visual researchers, such as scholars and students in sociology, anthropology, geography, communication and media studies, education, cultural studies, film studies, visual arts and related social science and humanities. As such, it will appeal to a multidisciplinary and international audience, and features a dynamic, forward-thinking, innovative, and contemporary focus oriented toward the very latest developments in the field, as well as future possibilities.

Publication Date: 2020

Publication Name: Routledge

Research Interests:
Visual Anthropology, Ethnography, Qualitative methodology, Ethnographic Film, Documentary Film, and Qualitative Research Methodology

Ethnography and qualitative research methodology in general have witnessed a staggering proliferation of styles and genres over the last three decades. Modes and channels of communication have similarly expanded and diversified. Now ethnographers have the opportunity to disseminate their work not only through traditional writing but also through aural, visual, performative, hypertext, and many diverse and creative multimodal documentation strategies. Yet, many ethnographers still feel insufficiently proficient with these new literacies and opportunities for knowledge mobilization, and they therefore still limit themselves to traditional modes of communication in spite of their desire for innovation. As university-based, community-driven and politically mandated agendas for broader knowledge transfer keep increasing worldwide, the demand for public scholarship continues to grow. Arguing for the need to disseminate innovative ethnographic knowledge more widely and more effectively, this book outlines practical strategies and tools for sharing ethnographic and qualitative research through widely accessible media such as magazines, trade books, blogs, newspapers, video, radio, and social media. Drawing from practical experiences and hands-on lessons, Doing Public Ethnography provides social scientists across all disciplines with concrete tactics for mobilizing knowledge beyond the academic realm.

Research Interests:
Ethnography, Qualitative methodology, Knowledge sharing, and Qualitative Research

Wilderness provides a multidisciplinary introduction into the diverse ways in which we make sense of wilderness: how we conceptualise it, experience it, interact with, and imagine it. Drawing upon key theorists, philosophers, and researchers who have contributed important knowledge to the topic, this title argues for a relational and process based notion of the term and understands it as a keystone for the examination of issues from conservation to more-than-human relations.

The text is organized around themed chapters discussing the concept of wilderness and its place in the social imagination, wilderness regulation and management, access, travel and tourism, representation in media and arts, and the use of wilderness for education, exploration, play, and therapy, as well as its parcelling out in parks, reserves, or remote "wastelands". The book maps out the historical transformation of the idea of wilderness, highlighting its intersections with notions of nature and wildness and teasing out the implications of these links for theoretical debate. It offers boxes that showcase important recent case studies ranging from the development of adventure travel and eco-tourism to the practice of trekking to the changing role of technology use in the wild. Summaries of key points, further readings, Internet-based resources, short videos, and discussion questions allow readers to grasp the importance of wilderness to wider social, cultural, political, economic, historical and everyday processes.

Wilderness is designed for courses and modules on the subject at both postgraduate and undergraduate levels. The book will also assist professional geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, environmental and cultural studies scholars to engage with recent and important literature on this elusive concept.

Research Interests:
Environmental Sociology, Geography, Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Social Geography, and 15 moreWilderness (Environment), Environmental Psychology, Conservation, Political Ecology, Environmental Studies, Environmental Anthropology, Environmental Management, Wildlife Ecology And Management, Ecology, Outdoor Education, Nature-based tourism, Wildlife Conservation, Human dimensions of wildlife, Wildlife Management, and Nature Conservation

In Popular Culture and Everyday Life Phillip Vannini and Dennis Waskul have brought together a variety of short essays that illustrate the many ways that popular culture intersects with mundane experiences of everyday life. Most essays are written in a reflexive ethnographic style, primarily through observation and personal narrative, to convey insights at an intimate level that will resonate with most readers. Some of the topics are so mundane they are legitimately universal (sleeping, getting dressed, going to the bathroom, etc.), others are common enough that most readers will directly identify in some way (watching television, using mobile phones, playing video games, etc.), while some topics will appeal more-or-less depending on a reader’s gender, interests, and recreational pastimes (putting on makeup, watching the Super Bowl, homemaking, etc.). This book will remind readers of their own similar experiences, provide opportunities to reflect upon them in new ways, as well as compare and contrast how experiences relayed in these pages relate to lived experiences. The essays will easily translate into rich and lively classroom discussions that shed new light on a familiar, taken-for-granted everyday life―both individually and collectively.

At the beginning of the book, the authors have provided a grid that shows the topics and themes that each article touches on. This book is for popular culture classes, and will also be an asset in courses on the sociology of everyday life, ethnography, and social psychology.

Research Interests:
Sociology, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Popular Culture, and 2 moreSociology of Everyday Life and Everyday Life

Myriad lines surround our day-to-day lives, exiting and entering our homes. Wires connect to electricity posts which power and heat our dwellings. Cables hook us to telephone and internet networks. Other lines stretch the world closer to us and our homes closer to the world: paved driveways link us with roads and highways, mains tap us into common water reserves and flow into municipal sewers, satellite beams reach into the atmosphere to download television signals into our living rooms. Together these lines—and possibly many others—constitute extensive and powerful webs of material and cultural significance in which our lives are suspended. These webs are the grids upon which society is pegged, the grids through which our material and social relations are entangled.
Not everyone, however, is reliant on these grids. People who—for a variety of motives—have spun alternative webs have come to know their lifestyle as “off-the-grid.” Off-the-grid dwelling refers to ways of living marked by disconnection from the infrastructural assemblages (or grids) that provide societies with the potential for power, light, and speed.
Grids of light, speed, and power can make our life comfortable and convenient but they are also troublesome companions. Grids deeply shape social relations and entrench them in differential access to power. In light of this, off-the-grid dwelling has recently emerged as an oppositional (but often negotiated and contradictory) everyday life practice. By delinking from one or more grids, an individual, group, or community needs to reinvent a different way of life and practice a different way of living.
Couched in cultural studies, cultural geography, and cultural sociology, this book aims to uncover the day-to-day practice off-grid living across Canada in order to understand why and how a person or community chooses to live off-grid; how off-the-grid dwellers cope with a world increasingly governed by the grid logic of light, power, and speed; what distinguishes off-grid dwellers' technologies and material cultures; how they accomplish comfort and convenience in their everyday life; and in what ways off-the-grid dwelling constitutes a sustainable, environmentally and culturally, lifestyle practice. In order to document the diversity of ways of life off-the-grid, the book unfolds as a series of ethnographic narratives focusing on individuals and groups who dwell in households and/or communities removed from roads, electricity, sewage, garbage collection, natural gas pipelines, water mains, telephone, internet, and television.
In addition to shedding light on off-grid lifestyles, however, this book prompts us to reflect on often taken-for-granted aspects of modern living. It aims to shows us what it means and what resources it takes to do the things we do every day: from bathing and washing and cleaning to cooking and refrigerating, from heating to cooling, from growing and hunting food to disposing of it in garbage cans and toilets, from switching on the light to flicking on appliances.

More Info: lifeoffgrid.ca

Publisher: Routledge

Publication Date: 2014

Research Interests:
Sociology, Cultural Studies, Human Geography, Canadian Studies, Ethnography, and 20 moreMaterial Culture Studies, Renewable Energy, Space and Place, Qualitative methodology, Environmental Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Water resources, Energy, Sense of Place, Technology And Culture, Domestic Space, Affect (Cultural Theory), Non-representational theories, Voluntary Simplicity, Everyday Life, Electricity, Canada, Lifestyle, Lifestyle Migration, and Off-grid Electricity

"Non-representational theory (or as it is sometimes referred to, “more-than-representational” theory) is one of the contemporary moment’s most influential theoretical perspectives within social and cultural theory.
And yet, it is often poorly understood. This is in part because of its complexity, but in large part also because of its limited treatment in few volumes chiefly dedicated to it. Indeed anyone wishing to better understand non-representational theory today has limited choices and is therefore left with a lot of interrogatives. Amongst the most important questions left unanswered are questions of method. All social and cultural theories—if they are to be proven useful—need to be applicable to the scopes of data analysis and representation. In other words, theories must be useful to researchers keen on utilizing concepts and analytical frames for their personal interpretive purposes. How useful non-representational theory is, in this sense, is yet to be understood. This book tackles this very subject and outlines a variety of ways in which non-representational ideas can influence the research process, the very value of empirical research, the nature of data, the political value of data and evidence, the methods of research, the very notion of method, and the styles, genres, and media of research.
"

More Info: Includes contributions by Alphonso Lingis, Kathleen Stewart, Hayden Lorimer, Mimi Sheller, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Ben Anderson and James Ash, Erin Manning, Elspeth Probyn, Dereck McCormack,

Publisher: Routledge

Publication Date: Dec 15, 2014

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Social Research Methods and Methodology, Research Methods and Methodology, Research Methodology, Ethnography, and 6 moreMethodology, Qualitative methodology, Qualitative Research, Qualitative Research Methods, Non-representational theory, and Non-representational theories

What do road infrastructures, media networks, ferry boats, cell phones, automobiles, and airplanes have in common? As attempts to come to terms with the virtual and material distance separating people, objects, and information they are all technologies of mobility which deeply shape our ways of life, informing ideas, demanding new skills and practices, facilitating or impeding relationships, and restricting or enabling access to crucial resources.

Forms of mobility challenge us to question the separation of disciplines such as those between communication and transportation, and of concepts such as time and space, or human subjects and material objects. The study of mobilities has recently begun to take on these challenges and to examine the social, political, historical, cultural, economic, geographic, communicative, and material dimensions of movement. Mobility studies concentrate on the intersecting movements of bodies, objects, capital, and signs across time-space, dissecting how practices, experiences representations, and political dynamics shape new networks and lifeworlds. The multiple forms of mobility examined by this young and growing field include—amongst others—subjects such as: transportation; travel and tourism; migration; transnational flows of people, objects, information, and capital; mobile communications; and social networks and meetings. This book aims to reflect on the simultaneously technological and cultural (hence, technocultural) processes underpinning many of these forms of mobility, concentrating in particular in the North, Central, and South American social context.

Whereas in Europe the study of mobilities has begun to take a strong hold in academic units, professional research networks, and recognized publication outlets, the study of mobilities is still in its adolescence in the Americas. Yet, in contrast, mobility is very much part of the core of the social imaginary, geo-politics, and cultural life of the Americas. Indeed, to be “on the move” is amongst the most quintessential characteristics of what it means to be a citizen of the Americas. This book aims to be the first to reflect on these dynamics within this large geo-cultural context.

More Info: Co-edited with Lucy Budd, Ole B Jensem, Christian Fisker, and Paola Jiron

Research Interests:
Mobility/Mobilities, Mobile Media, Transportation Studies, Anthropology of Mobility, Mobile Technology, and 2 moreMobile Communication and Mobility

This new methodological book/website hybrid offers academics, professional researchers, and students a broad survey of ways to popularize research. As an edited interdisciplinary book accompanied by a website featuring samples of popularized research, it will have the potential of not only telling its readers about new genres, new media, new strategies, and new imperatives for popularizing research, but most importantly it will also be useful in showing how these new processes work in the end, what they sound like, and what they look like. Visit the book’s website for more: www.popularizingresearch.net

More Info: Visit the book’s website for more: www.popularizingresearch.net

Research Interests:
Social Research Methods and Methodology, Research Methods and Methodology, Research Methodology, Qualitative Methods (Sociology), Qualitative methodology, and 6 moreQualitative Methods, Qualitative Methods (Methodology), Qualitative Research, Innovation and Knowledge Management, Qualitative Research Methods, and Qualitative Methodology (Sociology)

This book aims to be the definitive guide to the sociological and anthropological study of the senses. Through a thorough analytical review of classical, recent, and emerging scholarship and the use of grounded original empirical material as strategy for sparking interest and deepening review and analysis, this comprehensive map to the field intends to be the first reference tool for both students and scholars for years to come.

In bridging cultural/qualitative sociology and cultural/humanistic anthropology we intend to explicitly blur boundaries which, in this field, are particularly weak due to the ethnographic scope of much research. Serving both the sociological and anthropological constituencies at once means bridging ethnographic traditions, cultural foci, and socio-ecological approaches to embodiment and sensuousness. The Senses in Self, Culture, and Society is intended to be a milestone in the social sciences’ somatic turn.

Research Interests:
Anthropology of the Body, Sociology of the Body, Phenomenology of the body, Anthropology of the Senses, Anthropology of senses, and Sociology of the Senses

Imagine living in a place where feet and cars won’t get you very far without the help of a ferry boat. Picture having to surrender your freedom of movement to the vagaries of marine weather, to restrictions imposed by ferries’ timetables and loading capacity, and to the unpredictable fluctuations of daily and seasonal traffic. Visualize having to travel up to 36 hours to reach the nearest grocery store (and having to pay up to $300 for the privilege to get to it) and then needing to wait a week for the next homebound ferry.

How would your life change? What would home feel like? What would time mean? Would you have to re-learn how to move? And how would you feel about the technology—the ferry boat and the marine highways—that shapes your life? Would you antagonize your ferry like you would antagonize an abductor, an unreliable trickster, a greedy loan shark? Or would you embrace it as a protector? An ally in your quest to make your life different? A guardian angel keeping your place safe from the perils of the outside world? Would your ferry become part of your community, of your family, of your home? Would you use it to baby-sit your kids? Would it become part of your memories, of your biography? Would you risk your life to catch it? Would you fight to defend your island from the threat of a bridge?

Based on three years of fieldwork, 250 ferry trips, 381 interviews in three dozen island and remote coastal communities this book tells stories of movement, technoculture, and sense of place, highlighting the mundane rituals and dramas of life lived amidst routes and roots. The book will be accompanied by a 1-hour radio documentary, and a collection of images and digital narratives embedded in an interactive map.

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Social Geography, Ethnography, Spatial Practices, Mobility/Mobilities, and 14 moreMaritime Transport Geography, Island Studies, Transportation Studies, Anthropology of Mobility, Ritual, Transport Geography, Sense of Place, Social Experience of Time, Spatiality (Cultural geography), Anthropology of Technology, Performance Theory, Phenomenology of Temporality, Non-representational theory, and Non-representational theories

More Info: The purpose of this book is to use music as a tool to help students understand the structure and process of social life. Sociologically, music is important because it simultaneously contains and reflects a people's language, values, feelings, concerns, and goals. The material in this innovative, compact supplement is current and relevant to the musical experiences of today's college and university students and includes a companion web site that features an instructor's guide, test bank, discussion questions, and links to relevant internet sites. To make the book easy to use in introductory sociology courses, it is structured along lines parallel to the way most instructors teach the course.

Research Interests:
Sociology, Popular Culture, and Sociology of Music

More Info: "The Cultures of Alternative Mobilities" presents a series of ethnographic studies, focusing on the local cultures of mobilities and immobilities, emphasizing the everyday sense of contingency and heterogeneity that accompanies them. Compensating for the excess of theory and criticism based on the notion of 'hypermobilities', this book sheds light on the nuanced differences and idiosyncrasies of mobility, concentrating on alternative forms, with a view to rediscovering meanings and lifestyles marked by movement and immobility. With an international team of scholars presenting original empirical case studies from around the world, this book explores the complex, negotiated and contingent nature of the social worlds of movement. Avoiding sweeping generalizations on the deeply connected and readily mobile nature of society as a whole, this volume sheds light on the diversity of mobility modes. Accessible and interdisciplinary, this volume will be of interest, to sociologists, geographers and scholars of human mobility, communication and culture.

Research Interests:
Mobility/Mobilities and Anthropology of Mobility

More Info: The body and experiences of embodiment have generated a rich and diverse sociological literature. This book concentrates on articulating and illustrating one major approach to the sociology of the body. It draws on symbolic interactionism, an increasingly prevalent theoretical base of contemporary sociology derived from the pragmatism of writers such as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. The authors argue that from an interactionist perspective, the body is much more than a tangible, corporeal object. It is a vessel of meaning of great significance to the individual and society, and a social object. From this perspective body, self and social interaction are intimately interrelated and constantly being reconfigured. The essays in this collection constitute a unique anthology of empirical research on the body, from health and illness to sexuality, from beauty and imagery to bodily performance in sport and art, and from mediated communication to plastic surgery. These contributions are informed by innovative interactionist theory, offering fresh insights into one of the fastest growing sub-disciplines of sociology and cultural studies.

Research Interests:
The Body, Symbolic Interaction, Sociology of the Body, and Phenomenology of the body

More Info: Focusing on the technoculture of everyday life, this book attempts to zero in on the simplicity and the habitual character of the interaction between humans and material objects, which is often assumed or taken for granted. Because objects are always meaningful in the pragmatic use to which they are directed, the material world of everyday life can be seen as a technoculture of its ownone made of behaviors as simple, and yet as significant, as using a lawnmower, or decorating ones body. In discussing the unique methodological components of the ethnography of the technoculture of everyday li...

Research Interests:
Anthropology Of Technology (Anthropology), Technoculture, Ethnography, Material Culture Studies, Space and Place, and 5 moreQualitative methodology, Computer Networks, Databases, Software, and Science and Technology Studies

More Info: The concept of authenticity has begun to occupy a central role, yet in spite of its popularity as an ideal and philosophical value authenticity notably suffers from a certain vagueness.

Research Interests:
Authenticity

Papers

Drawing from multisite ethnographic research conducted at four Canadian UNESCO World Heritage natural sites, this writing focuses on the geosocialities of fossils and argues that fossils are alive: vitalist matter capable of affecting and being affected by the geosocial meshworks in which they are entangled. In the present writing, these relations are explored through more-than-representational ethnographic fragments intended to enliven the geophilia of fossils by underscoring the way they are animated through affect, memory, performance, narrative, possibility, and imagination.

DOI: 10.1177/1206331220956537

Publication Date: 2020

Publication Name: Space & Culture

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Cultural Heritage, Fossils, and Stone

This 40-day diary tracks the ordinary effects of self-isolation and quarantine on a small island off the British Columbia coast. Drawing on reflections on the emotional and embodied dimensions of self-isolation, and on observations of the effects of physical distancing in public spaces, the writing paints a picture of COVID-19 as atmospheric dis-ease. Whereas disease is sickness and disorder, dis-ease is a social malaise infecting the body public via atmospheric contagion. Atmospheric disease, it is argued, is a shared mode of attention and a mix of effects permeating a place with the diffused rhythms, shared sensations, contagious moods, and common orientations typical of self-isolation.

DOI: 10.1177/1206331220938640

Publication Date: 2020

Publication Name: Space & Culture

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Infectious Diseases, Affect, Atmosphere, and COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Drawing from our fieldwork conducted at three Canadian parks inscribed as Natural on the UNESCO World Heritage list (Kluane National Park, Dinosaur Provincial Park, and Wood Buffalo National Park) this paper describes wildness as an atmosphere. Through three ethnographic vignettes we paint a picture of wildness as a kind of ephemeral and uncontrollable event that can be felt and sensed, something that can be affected by a more-than-human life and something that can affect a more-than human life. Rather than thinking of wildness as a concept marked by absence—the absence of people, the absence of development, the absence of human history and society—we describe wildness as a presence. In doing so we re-envision wildness as the expression of the vitality of the sacred: a vitalist, life-giving energy that transcends human nature, a vitalist energy worthy of respect and honour. As ethnographic moments highlight, at times these vital energies are present and obvious, but at other times they are mere possibilities, speculations, implications, gestures suspended between presence and absence, vital forces of natures acting almost in excess of human comprehension and demanding careful attunement.

DOI: 10.1016/j.emospa.2020.100711

Publication Date: 2020

Publication Name: Emotion Space & Society

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Social Geography, Affect, Atmosphere, and Wilderness

Wood Buffalo National Park is Canada’s largest and the world’s second largest national park. For the last half century, industrial mega projects such as BC Hydro’s W.A.C. Bennett Dam first and tar sands oil extraction later have been exhausting the “natural resources” of the park, decimating wildlife, and severing the sacred relations among Indigenous people, their ways of life, and their land. This extractivist regime has led to a point when, in 2014, the Mikisew Cree First Nation—frustrated by the Canadian government’s continued unwillingness to listen to their grievances—filed a petition to ask UNESCO to add Wood Buffalo National Park to the list of the world’s endangered World Heritage sites. In this article, we describe how such events unfolded and what the current situation signifies for environmental politics, wilderness conservation, and Indigenous relations with settler society within a colonial state.

DOI: 10.1525/irqr.2019.12.3.278

Publication Date: 2019

Publication Name: International Review of Qualitative Research

Research Interests:
Indigenous Studies, Ethnography, Heritage Conservation, Environment and natural resources conservation, National Parks, and Protected areas

Can humans and wild life co-exist? Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in and nearby Waterton Lakes National Park and Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada, we present two etho-ethnographic fables that show how a positive coexistence of humans and wild life may be sought after and achieved. The two stories–narrated by animals’ voices–prompt us to rethink the very meanings of wild life and humanity and challenge us to envision and appreciate a new kind of affective relationship between people and non-human animals. By attending to the mutual trust and care inherent in respect-based multi-species entanglements, in this article we attune ourselves to the importance of the relational autonomy of wild animals and generate ideas on what wild life could be when understood from the perspective of relational and Indigenous ontologies.

DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2020.1717979

Publication Date: 2020

Publication Name: GeoHumanities

Research Interests:
Geography, Cultural Geography, Social Geography, Human-Animal Relations, Wildlife Conservation, and 4 moreEnvironmental Humanities, Geohumanities, Indigenous Ontologies, and Wildness

Whereas the arts have acquired a greater role in ethnographic practice as of late, artisanship has not; artisans regularly remain subjects of ethnographic analysis rather than educators or sources of epistemological and aesthetic inspiration for ethnographers. As students of material culture and aesthetic practices, we argue that ethnography has a lot to learn from artisans and advance a vision for an artisan-inspired ethnography. In particular, we ask, “what would an artisanal ethnography be like?” “What can we learn from artisans as ethnographic educators?” “How would the artisanship-inspired ethnographer work?” “What would be his or her styles, tools, goals, and guiding principles?” Through a methodological reflection on the production of our film A Time for Making, we engage with these questions.

DOI: 10.1177/1077800419863456

Publication Date: 2019

Publication Name: Qualitative Inquiry

Research Interests:
Ethnography, Ethnography (Research Methodology), Traditional Crafts, Ethnographic Film, Ethnographic fieldwork, and 3 moreVisual Ethnography, Ethnographic Methods, and Arts and Crafts

Countless authors have deconstructed both the romantic and the troubled history of wildness and wilderness, yet very few researchers have ever asked people: “What does wild mean to you?” In doing so, with our research we aim to understand wildness as a phenomenological and relational entity and aim to make sense of the multiple ways in which personal entanglements with particular places inform contingent and place-based ideas of wildness. Although there are many dimensions to both the experience and the idea of wildness, in this paper we reflect in particular on one: vitality. We draw our data from dozens of interviews held across Canada and base our interpretations on a combination of traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge, relational ontologies, and more-than-representational theories.

DOI: 10.1177/2514848619834882

Publication Date: 2019

Publication Name: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Social Geography, Wilderness (Environment), Conservation, Heritage Conservation, and 3 moreIndigenous Knowledge, Wildlife Conservation, and Non-representational theories

This paper reports on ethnographic research conducted at one of Canada's Natural World Heritage sites: Gros Morne National Park. UNESCO's criteria for the identification of natural heritage sites and its descriptions of the specific qualities of listed sites are informed by a dualist ontology that sharply separates nature and culture. The result of this separation between nature and culture is the construction of
natural heritage spaces that seem to exist in a vacuum from social life, abstracted from human relations, largely devoid of human presence, and thus emptied of the many stories that make them meaningful to both Indigenous and non‐Indigenous residents. In contrast, this paper/video combination describes how natures at a Canadian natural heritage site are relationally woven with the lives of their human inhabitants. The narratives we share about Gros Morne are meant to re‐animate this
site in response to the World Heritage classification, calling to attention the perpetual growth and becoming of its relational environments. We make our case by utilising a short video to recount the stories, experiences, and perspectives of a few residents who have taught us about Gros Morne. We argue that in place of natural heritage we ought to consider the concept of ecological heritage.

DOI: 10.1111/area.12533

Publication Date: 2019

Publication Name: AREA

Research Interests:
Social Geography, Cultural Heritage, Heritage Conservation, National Parks, Protected areas, and 2 moreNatural Heritage and NatureCultures

In 2009 UNESCO’s World Heritage Program inscribed nine mountain parks located in Northeastern Italy under the single Dolomites World Heritage Site (DWHS). Under criterion vii, they were acknowledged by the World Heritage Convention to be ‘widely regarded as being among the most attractive mountain landscapes in the world’ with their beauty being ‘intrinsic’ to the nature of the mountains. In our film and paper we argue for a reconsideration of the ‘intrinsic nature’ of its beauty in a sense that is much different than that intended by UNESCO. Following a relational line of reasoning we argue that the essence of the distinctive landscape of the Dolomites lies in the entanglements occurring among its inhabitants who, in the course of living there, have historically been and are currently immersed in its formation. We suggest that through such entanglements – sometimes consonant and sometimes dissonant with ‘authorized’ notions of the heritage landscape – the Dolomitic landscapes exist as manicured landscapes. By drawing from the concept of memoryscape and non-representational ideas we articulate the notion of a manicured landscape.

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Social Geography, Cultural Heritage, Cultural Landscapes, Ethnographic Film, and 8 moreWorld Cultural Heritage, Landscape, Visual Ethnography, Mountains, Heritage (cultural/natural), Dolomites, UNESCO world heritage, and South Tyrol

What matter is walking ground made of? And how does such ground matter? What is the relationship between walking surfaces and people’s experience of natural landscapes? And how do different ground surfaces enact different meshworks of conservation politics, mobility, and tourism infrastructure? Drawing from nonrepresentational theory and from audiovisual fieldwork conducted in and around Australia’s Cradle Mountain, part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, this article and its accompanying video focus on the materials of walking trails to understand the relations among walking, the built environment, and the sensory and affective experience of place. Arguing that trails and trail surfaces—and boardwalks in particular—serve as influential material conduits for variously contested outdoor recreation mobilities, this article develops the argument that pathways are elements in the world’s transformation of itself.

Research Interests:
Cultural Landscapes, Nature-based tourism, Visual Methodologies, Landscape, Nature, and 5 moreNon-representational theory, Non-representational theories, Visual Research Methods, Walking, and Tasmania

The present article is a brief reflection accompanying Low and Slow: a 26 min ethnographic video documenting the occupation of commercial floatplane pilots, with a particular focus on their skills, technologies, sense of place and knowledge of weather. The video was independently produced, directed and edited by the author of this article. To date the video is slated to air in the fall of 2016 on the Canadian TV channel Knowledge Network. The paper offers a reflection on the video’s objectives, its production and distribution in order to encourage others to practice video-based mobile methods, to edit their audiovisual work, and to disseminate it more widely than video-based research has been disseminated so far. To this effect, the article offers reflections on the fruitful intersection between mobile methods and ethnographic video, on precisely how Low and Slow was produced and distributed, and on why mobility students and scholars should view the use of video documentation as an important methodological research tool.

Research Interests:
Visual Studies, Ethnography, Mobility/Mobilities, Ethnographic Film, and Visual Ethnography

This paper explores the intensities of long-distance commuting journeys in order to understand how bodily sensibilities become attuned to the regular mobilities which they undertake. More people are travelling farther to and from work than ever before, owing to a variety of factors which relate to complex social and geographical dynamics of transport, housing, lifestyle, and employment. Yet, the experiential dimensions of long-distance commuting have not received the attention that they deserve within research on mobilities. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Australia, Canada, and Denmark this paper aims to further develop our collective understanding of the experiential particulars of long-distance workers or ‘supercommuters’. Rather than focusing on the extensive dimensions of mobilities that are implicated in broad social patterns and trends, our paper turns to the intensive dimensions of this experience for supercommuters by developing an understanding of embodied kinetic energy, commotion and quality. Exploring how experiences of supercommuters are constituted by a range of different material and bodily forces enables us to more sensitively consider the practical, technical, and affective implications of this increasingly prevalent yet underexplored travel practice.

Research Interests:
Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Social Geography, Mobility/Mobilities, Transportation Studies, and 4 moreTransportation, Mobility, Travel, and Traveling

In this article we present a theoretical framework for an understanding of the relationship between the material design of mobilities technologies and the multisensorial human body. Situating our work in the emerging field of “mobilities design” within the broader so-called mobilities turn, we focus on two very different aircraft types and their design (the large passenger jet Boeing 737 and the small propeller aircraft DHC-2) in order to explore the sensuousness of in-flight experience and atmosphere. We focus on the interior design of the aircraft as well as on their technical capacities, and end with a conclusion that offers a fl at ontological view of mobilities design. We argue that according the material design of mobilities technologies must be inscribed on equal terms with the sensing human subject if we are to claim that we have reached a better understanding of how mobility feels.

Research Interests:
Mobility/Mobilities

During 2014–2015, we produced a short video documentary, titled The Art of Wild, which focused on the audiovisual practices of outdoor adventurers. This short written report reflects on an idea inspired by the video: the GoPro gaze. Enacted by increasingly sophisticated, portable and affordable recording audiovisual technologies such as the GoPro Hero camera, the ‘GoPro gaze’ entails not just the pursuit of pleasures derived from adventure and nature-based travel, but also the production and distribution of professional-quality independent videos for Internet audiences. Based on a series of ‘go-along’ interviews with adventure travelers/athletes/artists, this article and the accompanying video prompt us to reflect on how the affective pleasures and technological affordances of the ‘GoPro gaze’ trouble the established idea of the ‘tourist gaze’.

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Social Geography, Video Art, Visual Communication, and Documentary Film

Over the last decade and a half, socio-cultural geographies have witnessed a genuine explosion of interest in the ethnographic tradition. Such interest is due in part to the increasing acceptance of non-representational ideas across the field and the way these ideas have constructively informed the long-standing debate on the analytics, esthetics, and politics of ethnographic representation. Non-representational theoretical ideas have influenced the way ethnographers tackle important methodological and conceptual undercurrents in their work, such as vitality, performativity, corporeality, sensuality, and mobility. This article aims to capture a few of the characteristics of this constantly evolving non-representational ethnographic style. Non-representational ethnography seeks to cultivate an affinity for the analysis of events, practices, assemblages, structures of feeling, and the backgrounds of everyday life against which relations unfold in their myriad potentials. Non-representational ethnography emphasizes the fleeting, viscous, lively, embodied, material, more-than-human, precognitive, non-discursive dimensions of spatially and temporally complex lifeworlds.

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Research Methodology, Ethnography, Qualitative methodology, and Non-representational theory

A film review of Pegi Vail's 2013 film, depicting the consequences of nature-based tourism.

Research Interests:
Anthropology, Tourism Studies, Ethnography, and Documentary Film

Academic ethnographers have been utilizing film, and more recently video, for a variety of research purposes including the collection, analysis, and dissemination of data. But ethnographic film and video are not the exclusive domain of university-based ethnographers or professionally trained ethnographic researchers. More and more ethnographic films and video documentaries are nowadays produced by filmmakers who aren’t necessarily interested in utilizing their work to advance anthropological, sociological, or other disciplines’ theoretical or substantive agendas. Interestingly, these documentaries often garner wider distribution and larger audiences than ethnographic films and videos made by academics, leading us to question the identity of ethnographic documentary and the potential of this genre to both advance ethnological knowledge and the sociocultural imagination. In this article, I examine this phenomenon focusing on nonacademic wide-distribution ethnographic documentaries available on cable and satellite TV, Netflix, and iTunes, reflecting on their content, style, distribution strategies, and their status as social scientific ethnographic representations

Publication Date: Jun 26, 2014

Publication Name: Journal of contemporary ethnography

Research Interests:
Film Studies, Ethnography, Qualitative methodology, Documentary (Film Studies), Qualitative Research, and 2 moreEthnographic Film and Documentary Film

Though research on back-to-the-landers, smallholders, organic farmers, community gardeners and eco-villagers is copious, extremely little knowledge exists on off-grid living. “Off-grid” refers to a home or community disconnected from regional electricity and natural gas infrastructures. Off-gridder dwellers not only generate power and heat but in general also practice relative self-sufficiency when it comes to food production. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in Canada, this paper examines the practices of growing, cooking, eating and disposing of off-grid organic food. Off-gridders’ practices present a counter-hegemonic idea of convenience which emphasizes the importance of food that is local, self-produced, sustainably-cooked and sustainably disposed of. We argue that off-gridders engage in acts of “deconcession,” that is, practices that respatialize and reconfigure food-based assemblages of materials, institutions, practices, representations and experiences by way of reduced reliance on the dominant system of distant food supply.

More Info: co-authored with Jonathan Taggart

Publication Name: Food, Culture & Society

Research Interests:
Cultural Studies, Environmental Sociology, Cultural Geography, Ethnography, Renewable Energy, and 10 moreSociology of Food and Eating, Anthropology of Food, Local food, Food, Food and Nutrition, Food Production, Cooking, Climate Change and Food Security, Eating, and Living off the Grid

Solar energy harnessed through photovoltaic panels powers the greatest majority of the domestic electricity needs of off-grid homes. Solar energy can be rather easily stored in batteries; however, the cost of battery banks and the need to limit draining these batteries to increase their life, means that solar-powered home dwellers need to carefully monitor their energy consumption and reduce electricity use when solar energy becomes scarce. So what happens during fall and winter months when cloudy skies and long dark days make solar energy scarce? Drawing from ethnographic research with Canadian off-grid homeowners, this paper examines the everyday ways in which off-gridders adapt to seasonal darkness. Ethnographic data show how people’s diurnal and seasonal rhythms change in accordance with available sunlight and therefore more broadly how people’s relationships with place are shaped by changing temporalities of light and darkness. Focusing in particular on the alternative domestic technologies off-gridders use to reduce wattage consumption (e.g. LED televisions, DC lights, non-use of heat-producing appliances, use of manually-operated tools) and juxtaposing their lifestyles with domestic practices of the past this paper argues that off-gridders challenge the speed, light, and power assemblages of modernity, by cultivating slower rhythms and power self-sufficiency.

More Info: co-authored with Jonathan Taggart

Publication Name: Cultural geographies

Research Interests:
Cultural Studies, Environmental Sociology, Cultural Geography, Renewable Energy, Energy, and 9 moreEnergy and Environment, Renewable energy resources, Energy efficiency, Renewable Energy Systems, Temporality (Time Studies), Everyday Life, Solar Energy, Weather, and Home Power

Drawing from ethnographic research in Canadian off-grid homes, this paper examines the notion of visual comfort. Like other types of comfort, visual comfort is an affective sensibility whose intensity and achievement are highly variable. Through their unique historical trajectories grid-connected homes have achieved and normalized visual comfort in particular ways, but—as the experiences of off-grid homes show—in no way is domestic visual comfort achievable only by flicking on an electric lightbulb powered by distant sociotechnical assemblages. Comfort is, in fact, not a uniform experience and off-gridders’ practices show vividly what it means to achieve it differently—in variable intensities and through alternative entanglements of nature and culture. In particular, we argue that off-gridders’ comfort is a direct reflection of their involvement in its production, ensuing from their participation in electricity generation

More Info: co-authored with Jonathan Taggart

Publication Name: Environment & Planning D

Research Interests:
Cultural Studies, Cultural Geography, Social Geography, Visual Studies, Renewable Energy, and 12 moreVisual Culture, Consumer Behavior, Visual Ethnography, Consumer Research, Affect (Cultural Theory), Visual comfort, Living off the Grid, The Senses, Rural studies, Alternative Energy, New Energy, Non-Renewable Energy, Renewable Energy, Transition Energy, Solar Energy, Lighting, Off Grid, Off-grid Electricity, and Home Power

In the contemporary, industrialized, urban world practices of domestic water usage typically transcend the physical boundaries of the home as indoor plumbing connects with municipal sewer lines and water mains.
These infrastructural connections sever the sites of individual water consumption from the sites of its collection, storage, purification, and distribution. But what happens when individual homeowners become self-sufficient for gathering, conserving, and recycling water? Drawing from ethnographic research conducted amidst off-grid homeowners this paper examines how practices of domestic water conservation and usage unfold when individuals become self-sufficient for water. We find that off-grid homeowners engage in what we call “onerous consumption”—a type of alternatively hedonistic consumption characterized by burdensome involvement in the gathering, conserving, channeling, utilization, and disposal of resources. We argue that “onerous consumption” results in a profound awareness of resource utilization and consequently leads to greater resource conservation. We reflect on the value of the concept of onerous consumption for research and theorizing on sustainable and ethical consumption.

More Info: co-authored with Jonathan Taggart

Publication Date: Nov 18, 2013

Publication Name: Journal of Consumer Culture

Research Interests:
Cultural Studies, Cultural Geography, Sustainable Production and Consumption, Water, Renewable Energy, and 14 moreConservation, Water resources, Ethical Consumption, Consumption, Consumption Studies, Domestic Space, Renewable energy resources, Sociology of consumption, Consumption and Material Culture, Home, Living off the Grid, Responsible Consumption, Consumption Culture, and Waste, Materials and Consumption

Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in Alberta, as well as across multiple sites in Canada, this article describes and discusses the practices and experiences of heating off the grid with renewable resources (i.e. passive solar and wood). Heating with renewable resources is herein examined in order to apprehend the cultural significance of dynamics of corporeal involvement in the process of creating indoor warmth. A distinction between energy for which corporeal involvement is relatively high (hot energy) and relatively low (cool energy) is then made. Off-grid indoor warmth is therefore understood as a hot energy requiring intense involvement. The authors argue that thermoception is a type of affect with catalytic properties.

Publication Name: Body & Society

Research Interests:
Architecture, Renewable Energy, Anthropology of the Body, Energy, The Body, and 12 moreEnergy and Environment, Sociology of the Body, Phenomenology of the body, Anthropology of the Senses, Visual Ethnography, Affect (Cultural Theory), Tim Ingold, Home, Solar Energy, Heating, Ventilating, Air Conditioning & Refrigeration, The Senses, and Off-grid Electricity

Research Interests:
Ethnography, Qualitative methodology, Qualitative Methods, Ethnography (Research Methodology), Qualitative Research, and 2 moreQualitative Research Methods and Ethnographic Methods

Drawing from ethnographic research on Canadian people living off-grid we describe and interpret how people without formal training in architecture or construction manage to build their own homes. Our findings show that they do so thanks to what we call regenerative life skills. Juxtaposing our argument in the context of DIY (do-it-yourself) research and discourse we argue that rather than in a solo endeavor off-grid builders engage in relational practices, becoming entangled with others, with historical traditions, with place-specific resources, and with the affordances of the materials they utilize. DIW (do-it-with) relies on the engagement of what we call regenerative life skills – drawing from relational theory and regenerative design.

Publication Name: Cultural Geographies

Research Interests:
Cultural Studies, Cultural Geography, Visual Anthropology, Material Culture Studies, Renewable Energy, and 12 moreWind Energy, Sustainable Building Design, Vernacular Architecture, Alternative Energy, Visual Ethnography, Material Culture, Home, Electricity, Green Building, DIY culture, Solar Energy, and Home Power

Ethnography has witnessed a staggering proliferation of genres over the last three decades. Modes of communication have similarly expanded. In spite of this, most ethnographers still rely on the prototypical media of their trade: the book and the journal article. The objective of this article is to examine the process of communicating ethnography through more widely accessible media such as popular print magazines, web-based magazines, and blogs. Drawing examples from my own public ethnography, I reflect on practical considerations that ethnographers might want to entertain whenever they attempt to popularize their work through these channels. I also provide reflections on the risks and limitations typical of these media.

Publication Name: Qualitative Research

Research Interests:
Creative Writing, Blogs, Research Methodology, Ethnography, Qualitative methodology, and 4 moreQualitative Methods, Academic Writing, Ethnography (Research Methodology), and Qualitative Research Methods

Research Interests:
Knowledge Management, Participatory Action Research, Action Research, Ethnography, Qualitative methodology, and 5 moreQualitative Methods, Qualitative Research, Qualitative Research Methods, Visual Ethnography, and Sensory Ethnography

Research Interests:
Cultural Studies, Rural Sociology, Cultural Geography, Social Geography, Ethnography, and 9 moreRenewable Energy, Qualitative methodology, Environmental Studies, Energy, Rural Geography, Energy and Environment, Voluntary Simplicity, Living off the Grid, and Amenity Migration

More Info: The latest in a series of popular articles about ongoing research on off-grid lifestyles

Research Interests:
Sociology, Cultural Studies, Social Movements, Cultural Geography, Social Geography, and 6 moreCanadian Studies, Technology, Renewable Energy, Subcultures, Environmental Sustainability, and Alternative Energy

More Info: The latest in a series of popular magazine writings on my ongoing ethnography on the off-grid lifestyle

Research Interests:
Cultural Studies, Cultural Geography, Renewable Energy, Environmental Sustainability, and Lifestyle & Consumption

In what ways do paces of movement shape places, and how do different places shape their movements’ paces? The objective of this paper is to provide exploratory answers to these questions by focusing on the mobility constellations of ferry-dependent islands and coastal communities of Canada’s west coast. I focus on the slower temporalities and spatialities of mechanized technologies of mobility by drawing upon research conducted for a larger ethnographic project aimed at understanding the multiple roles played by ferry mobilities in the lives of British Columbia’s ferry-dependent islands and coastal residents. Boats’ rhythms, speed, and the duration of journeys occasion the conditions for the cultivation of an empirically unique region-specific sense of time. Within this ethnographic context ferry boats serve as technologies through which residents of island and coastal communities weave distinct place temporalities and mobility constellations. Islanders and coasters employ the affordances of ferries to break away from the place temporalities typical of the city. Such movement toward separation from the urban is what I refer to as moving ‘out of time’. Moving ‘out of time’ is done in order to tune into the alternative insular and coastal temporal regimes deemed more desirable by the locals. Such movement toward attunement is what I refer to as moving ‘in time’.

More Info: Published in Time & Society, 2012

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Mobility/Mobilities, Space and Place, Time Perception, and Phenomenology of Space and Place

More Info: Co-authored with Jonathan Taggart, published in Canadian Geographic, June 2012

Research Interests:
Cultural Studies, Cultural Geography, Renewable Energy, Space and Place, Energy, and 13 moreSustainable Building Design, Energy and Environment, Sustainable Energy, Sociology of Technology, Sociology of Everyday Life, Sustainable Architecture, Visual Ethnography, Smart Grid, Microgrid, Fuel Cell Vehicles, Geography of Energy, Plug In Hybrid Electric Vehicles, and Hydrogen Economy

Drawing from sensory ethnography, the present multimodal writing—accompanied by photography and digital video—documents and interprets the mobilities of off-grid living on Lasqueti Island, British Columbia, Canada. The data presentation focuses in particular on the embodied experience of off-grid inhabitation, highlighting the sensory and kinetic experiences and practices of everyday life in a community disconnected from the North American electrical grid and highway network. The mobilities of fuel and energy are presented in unison with ethnographic attention to the taskscape of everyday activities and movements in which off-grid islanders routinely engage. The analysis, based on Tim Ingold's non-representational theory on place, movement, and inhabitation, focuses on how the material and corporeal mobilities of off-grid life body forth a unique sense of place.

More Info: Published in Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies

Research Interests:
Cultural Studies, Cultural Geography, Sustainable Communities, Mobility/Mobilities, Renewable Energy, and 18 moreSpace and Place, Island Studies, Energy, Sustainable Building Design, The Body, Sense of Place, Energy and Environment, Sociology of the Body, Phenomenology of the body, Sustainable Energy, Sociology of Technology, Sociology of Everyday Life, Environmental Sustainability, Sustainable Architecture, Phenomenology of Space and Place, Renewable Energy Systems, British Columbia and the Canadian West, and Geography of Energy

Drawing from recent analytical developments in semiotics and postmodern
ethnography, this article exposes and assesses the combination of social
semiotics and fieldwork as a form of qualitative inquiry. Approaches to semiotics
and fieldwork are not new—structural ethnographers in cultural anthropology
and structural interactionists in sociology and communication studies
have previously laid the foundations for the integration of formal methods of
analysis and inductive approaches to data collection—yet, as this article
argues, structuralism’s limitations have hampered the growth of semiotics
within qualitative inquiry. By presenting social semiotics as a viable alternative
to structural semiotics, by describing in clear pedagogical fashion how
social semiotics can be used as a research strategy, and by exposing its potential
for applicability, this article attempts to bring sociosemiotic ethnography
to the forefront of contemporary qualitative inquiry.

More Info: Published in Qualitative Inquiry, 2007

Research Interests:
Semiotics, Research Methodology, Ethnography, Qualitative methodology, Cultural Semiotics, and 6 moreVisual Semiotics, Symbolic Interaction, Qualitative Research Methods, Social Semiotics, Symbolic Interactionism, and Multimodality, Social Semiotics

Within social psychology, the concept of authenticity of the self has traditionally
suffered from lack of definitional clarity. In this article, after conceptualizing
authenticity as the phenomenological emotional experience
of feeling true to one’s self, the author empirically examines the diversity
of emotions associated with various degrees of authenticity and inauthenticity.
Data for this study are from semi-structured in-depth interviews
with forty-six faculty members employed at a public research
university in the United States. Professors’ experiences of and dispositions
toward teaching, and their experiences of authenticity and inauthenticity,
are examined against the background of structural and cultural
forces and changes in American higher education. Data interpretation
shows that teaching is mostly a source of authenticity for professors in the
humanities, and less for those professors who identify themselves primarily
as researchers.

More Info: Published in Symbolic interaction, 2006

Research Interests:
Social Psychology, Self and Identity, Sociology of Work, Higher Education, Authenticity, and 2 moreSymbolic Interaction and Symbolic Interactionism

My book review of Tim Ingold's Being Alive, Ways of Walking, and Redrawing Anthropology

More Info: Forthcoming, yet-to-be-copy-edited review of Ingold's recent work, to be published in the journal Transfers

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Perception, Mobility/Mobilities, Anthropology of Knowledge, Cultural Theory, and 4 moreTheory (Anthropology), Cultural Anthropology, Non-representational theory, and Non-representational theories

More Info: Co-authored with Dennis Waskul, forthcoming in the Handbook of Dramaturgy, edited by Charles Edgley (Ashgate, 2013)

Research Interests:
Dramaturgy, Symbolic Interaction, Sociology of the Body, Performance Theory, Affect (Cultural Theory), and Erving Goffman

See the book's website at: http://www.popularizingresearch.net/

More Info: Introductory chapter for the book published in 2012 by Peter Lang

Research Interests:
Social Research Methods and Methodology, Research Methods and Methodology, Research Methodology, Qualitative Methods (Sociology), Qualitative methodology, and 7 moreQualitative Methods, Knowledge Transfer, Qualitative Research, Qualitative Research Methods, Arts-based methodologies, Arts-Based Research, and Knowledge Mobilization

See accompanying multimedia essay here: http://ferrytales.innovativeethnographies.net/content/ghosts-sailings-past

More Info: Co-authored with Rhys Evans.

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Technology, Mobility/Mobilities, Cultural Memory, Sense of Place, and 3 moreTechnology And Culture, Performance Theory, and British Columbia and the Canadian West

More Info: Introductory chapter co-authored with Lucy Budd, Ole B. Jensen, Christian Fisker, and Paola Jiron

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Social Geography, Mobility/Mobilities, Transportation Studies, Anthropology of Mobility, and Technology And Culture

This paper presents both an empirical characterization and a theoretical treatment of an island as practice. Through video and ethnographic description we describe and interpret how one kind of islandness is done. Thus we understand islandness corporeally, affectually, practically, intimately, as a visceral experience. Basing our conceptual treatment on the non-representational idea of dwelling, we approach place as a kind of practice. We view the key performances through which an island becomes such as practices of incorporation. Inhabitants, we believe, incorporate a place not by way of mental design or blueprints, or by way of signifying comparisons and juxtapositions, but rather by sheer practical, creative, skillful engagement with its affordances. Thus we understand the practices of an islander as someone who assembles together an island by way of making use of whatever is at hand, solving going concerns as they present themselves.

Read more: http://publicethnography.net/projects/it-me-or-does-paper-move

More Info: Co-authored with Jonathan Taggart

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Canadian Studies, Practice theory, Ethnography, Mobility/Mobilities, and 6 moreIsland Studies, Phenomenology, Sense of Place, Visual Ethnography, Non-representational theories, and British Columbia and the Canadian West

Living off the grid tie doesn’t mean living without a road to take home. It's true that there are some small island communities (such as British Columbia’s Lasqueti Island) which thrive without a bridge or a car ferry, but it is uncommon for off-grid dwellings to be without some kind of road access. And while it's true that you’re unlikely to run into an off-grid home near a freeway exit or along a littered cup's windblown flight route from the nearest Tim Horton's, the acreages in the exurban and rural areas that off-gridders call home are always located at the end of a driveway.

http://publicethnography.net/ice-roads-mobilities-photo-essay-mackenzie-delta

More Info: A photo essay with Jonathan Taggart

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Mobility/Mobilities, Material Culture Studies, Anthropology of Mobility, and Material Culture

More Info: First chapter of the book: The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture."

Research Interests:
Cultural Sociology, Anthropology of the Body, Symbolic Interaction, Sociology of the Body, Anthropology of the Senses, and 3 moreSensory Ethnography, Symbolic Interactionism, and Sociology of the Senses

Culture is what people do together (cf. Becker 1986; Ingold 2000). Such a focus on collective doing, making, and the materiality and consequentiality of action-based cultural processes is what sensitizing concepts like “material culture” and “technoculture” are meant to highlight. Conceptualizing culture as action and interaction is intended to downplay the importance of cognitive cultural dimensions such as values, beliefs, codes, and ideas and to emphasize instead bodily engagements, techniques, skills, habits, and the materiality of the world of interaction. The scope of this chapter is to survey the ontological foundations of such ideas and therefore of perspectives that view material culture and technoculture as interaction. By taking some license in blurring boundaries amongst theoretical traditions, in what follows I review four basic principles of pragmatism, symbolic interactionism, performance theory, and social semiotics. The chapter is divided into four parts. Each part reviews one of the four principles that distinguish this pan-theoretical perspective: diffused agency, semiotic power, ecology, and emergence.

More Info: Published in the book Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches

Research Interests:
Technology, Material Culture Studies, Computer Networks, Symbolic Interaction, Technology And Culture, and 6 moreSociology of Technology, Databases, Material Culture, Symbolic Interactionism, Software, and Science and Technology Studies

More Info: A magazine article, rather than a paper, on people living off grids.

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Ethnography, Renewable Energy, Energy, Energy Efficiency Buildings, and 3 moreSense of Place, Energy and Environment, and Renewable Energy Systems

Publisher: JSTOR

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2006

Publication Name: Symbolic Interaction

Research Interests:
Symbolic Interactionism

Drawing from fieldwork conducted to examine the roles played by ferry mobilities in the lives of residents of ferry-dependent islands and coastal communities of British Columbia, Canada, this paper focuses on three elements of spatial mobility assemblages: motives, costs, and frictions. In doing so, this paper contributes to the growing literature on the politics of mobility constellations. Data shed light on the transformative, but contested, power of spatial mobilities. To analyze these dynamics the analysis builds upon Ingold’s ideas on wayfaring to highlight how practices, representations, and experiences of ferry
mobility exercise their transformative power.

More Info: Published in Social & Cultural Geography, 2011, 12:5, 471-492

Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Social Geography, Canadian Studies, Sustainable Transportation, Mobility/Mobilities, and 3 moreIsland Studies, Transportation Studies, and British Columbia and the Canadian West