Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the production and experience of mobility (Cresswell, 2001) and through reviewing society
(or perhaps the privileging of types of society) through mobility (Terranova-Webb, 2010).
Thirdly, Thulemark (2011) challenges conventional thinking about lifestyle (Benson and
O'Reilly, 2009; Casado-Diaz,
Chapter 15
of this volume) and amenity migration (Moss,
2006) by suggesting that the lack of connection between migration and tourism has been
mainly about convenience (and perhaps disciplinary boundaries). She argues that there are
strong links between lifestyle migration - again perhaps lifestyle mobility, amenity migration
and tourism (Thulemark, 2011). Her research focuses on movement to mountainous areas in
New Zealand and highlights that the complexity of the social motivations for this kind of
move(ment) are under-researched. Thulemark's research links Cohen's (2009, 2010) ideas of
lifestyle through Terranova-Webb's (2010) problematisation of mobility. Her research high-
lights the different scales of mobility - from the motives to move to a mountainous area to the
smaller, more local movements that impact on how individuals are accepted and absorbed into
local communities. These three authors' use of mobilities connects back to Adey (2010) in
that each researcher has used ideas of mobility to engage their respondents and communicate
their fi ndings. Specifi cally, each author has considered not only how the world (for their
participants) is seen, made sense of and experienced but also how the world and the sense of it
is made through movement and motion (Büscher and Urry, 2009: 110).
Mobile methods
Drawing on Law and Urry (2004), Büscher
et al.
(2011; see also Büscher and Urry, 2009: 103)
state that existing social science methods deal poorly 'with the fl eeting . . . with the multiple -
that which takes different shapes in different places . . . with the non-causal, the chaotic,
the complex'. They suggest that there is a need to engage with the mobile, a need to overcome
the problems and accept the opportunities of doing research that tries 'to move with, be
moved by, the fl eeting, disturbed, multiple, non-causal, sensory, emotional and kinaesthetic'
(Büscher
et al.
, 2011: 2). From ideas of following people, to walking with, to following the
thing, there is an element of sustaining the engagement in order to observe, experience and
interact with those people or things under study.
In trying to utilise mobile methods, it is about moving from using the empirical only as
evidence to making it much more complex. Büscher and Urry (2009: 111) suggest that these
methods can create a double transparency which 'allows them to study and describe mobility
phenomena in the making whilst simultaneously drawing the methods used in their produc-
tion to their own and their audiences' attention', thus allowing alternative ways of perceiving
the connections between theory, observation and engagement (Büscher
et al.
, 2011).
The study of mobilities therefore needs to become intrinsically bound up with the practice
of mobile methods and so it seems necessary to challenge traditional qualitative methods in
order to recognise that 'it is not just how people make knowledge of the world, but how they
physically and socially make the world through the ways they move and mobilise people,
objects, information and ideas' (Büscher and Urry, 2009: 112).
Conclusions
Hannam
et al.
(2006: 15) suggest there is a complex relationship between the sensuous
'relationality' between travel and traveller and that these geographies extend beyond the body
to the national, to leisure spaces, to neighbourhoods and beyond (see also Edensor and
Falconer,
Chapter 9
of this volume). The link here between the sensuous, the haptic and
