Mobile video ethnography for evoking animals in tourism

doi:10.1016/j.annals.2021.103203

Annals of Tourism Research

Volume 89, July 2021, 103203

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2021.103203 Get rights and content

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open access

Highlights

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Mobile video ethnography appreciates lively and moving multispecies encounters.
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“Go alongs” with the minicam bring forth the messy aspects of the encounters.
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Mobile video ethnography offers a means of accounting for animal agency in tourism.
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Touristic mushing emerges in mixed-species spaces of work.

Abstract

Methodologies to account for animal agency in tourism are still in their infancy. This paper extends developments that seek to enrich methodologies for studying the role of animals in tourism by arguing that methods relying solely on talk- and text-based accounts struggle to appreciate the moving encounters between human and non-human animals. Hence, the paper embraces the opportunities afforded through moving image methodologies by exploring mobile video ethnography as a way to account for and understand how tourism emerges through encounters between living agents. Whilst recognising the need for caution, the paper demonstrates how mobile multispecies video ethnography contributes to gaining access to the intimate spaces of human-animal encounters in tourism.

Keywords

Multispecies encounters

Mobile video ethnography

Animal agency

Animal work

Mushing

Cited by (0)

Mikko Äijälä is a PhD candidate at the University of Lapland, Multidimensional Tourism Institute, Rovaniemi, Finland. His research interests include nature-based tourism, human-animal relations in tourism and mobile and visual methods. His research is informed by animal geography, human-animal-environment relations in particular. He is currently working on his PhD project focusing on agency in human-sled dog encounters in tourism.