Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
other and leisure is not the part of life to be missed (see Boon, 2006; Wyn and Willis, 2001).
Being mobile becomes a lifestyle; mobility is thus part of the everyday (Edensor, 2007). In
tourism destinations such as Queenstown in New Zealand or Whistler in Canada, the blur-
ring between work, leisure and travel therefore becomes increasingly complex (Boon, 2006;
Duncan, 2007). At the same time, ideas about social distance between host (working tourist)
and guest (tourist) (Baum, 1997, 2006) - specifi cally in a developed world context - also blur
as these groups/individuals share similar experiences of mobility.
It seems that instead of travel being a neutral process (Hannam
et al.
, 2006), research that
examines those who are travelling, for instance on a gap year, experiencing their OE or back-
packing, has shown how these individuals practise their mobility and how this mobility can
illustrate social, cultural, economic and political networks. These networks involve space,
place, people, information, knowledge and material goods as well as crossing borders, time
zones and latitudes. Ideas such as Clifford's (1997) dwelling-in-travel; Bianchi's (2000) conten-
tion that his migrant tourist workers are neither strictly tourists nor workers; and Adler and
Adler's (1999) ideas of these individuals as driven by dual motivations of work and leisure - or
perhaps production and consumption (and it can be argued that tourism is now only about
production, consumption and mobility (Burns and Novelli, 2008) - lead to questioning of the
complex interrelations between travel and home, home and away and home and not-home (see
Ahmed
et al.
, 2003).
These discussions lead on to three specifi c examples of current research which is adopting
a broadly tourism geographies perspective. Cohen's (2009, 2010) work on lifestyle travellers
refl ects a dearth of literature on a group of individuals who differ from the 'typical' back-
packer, yet whose self-defi nition revolves around travel (Cohen, 2010: 35). Whilst Cohen
describes his respondents as 'lifestyle travellers', there is certainly room to consider these indi-
viduals as participating in lifestyle mobilities. Cohen's work highlights that, for many of his
lifestyle travellers, travel (and escape) is about a movement away from perceived values of
their home cultures, whether this be expectations about work or responsibilities or dressing
or behaving in certain ways (Cohen, 2010). Thus his respondents were, through their rejec-
tion of 'home', using tourism and mobility as a way to defi ne self. Using Davidson's (2005:
36) idea of travel as a route to fi nd one's own space, Cohen (2010: 40) suggests that 'experi-
ences that can provide a temporary perception of escape as well as allow participants to work
and play with identity should not be undervalued'.
The second example suggests that mobility can perhaps be seen as privileging one move-
ment over another (Cresswell, 2001; Merriman, 2007). Taking this further, while mobility
research has trod carefully around the nomad metaphor (Cresswell, 1997; Kaplan, 1996;
Merriman, 2007), Terranova-Webb (2010) has suggested that, by doing so, a mobile perspec-
tive has been lost. Her research, which included fi ve months of mobile fi eldwork with the
Kelly Miller Circus, shows how the circus can represent 'a situation of continuing and stable
physical movement in which the production of movement continually creates a recognisable,
yet fl exible, situation' (Terranova-Webb, 2010: ii). She proposes a concept of stable mobility
which highlights the point that continual mobility processes can create a stable place, are
necessary for the stability of place, and that their absence creates a disruption in situation
(Terranova-Webb, 2010: 20). For Terranova-Webb, the concept of mobility recognises the
need for performance in the production of mobility as well as the need for disruption, in her
case, to maintain a recognisable circus. She argues for a fl exibility in both these processes to
allow places such as the circus to be 'affected by the locations through which they move but
not be tied to them in the production of their movement' (Terranova-Webb, 2010: 45). Thus,
she suggests, stable mobility contributes to mobilities research by considering differences in
