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This article explores the ways in which, during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, AirBnb’s successful place-based Experiences product was reimagined as a live online offering, marketed to would-be tourists living under ‘stay at home’ orders. Using online ethnographic and interpretive analysis of these new virtual experiences, we highlight a series of core placemaking strategies employed by hosts of the once in-situ experiences to show how they reemerge as interactive digital placemakers. In doing so, we elucidate how live, multimedia digital experiences become part of an evolution in the creation of ‘placemarkets’ that are now fundamental to both global mobility and globalized commercial exchange in the experience economy. Beyond the technological features used for these placemaking experiences, we find that the experience hosts and their manifold strategies to substantively engage participants – particularly through igniting their senses – are at the crux of digital placemaking; it is the affective labor of the hosts that most contributes to experiencing emplacement.

Might listening across scales help us understand, map and protect wild spaces? This chapter considers the potential for listening methods to integrate ethnographic, cartographic, geological and ecological perspectives toward more inclusive map-making. Effective conservation policy and planning must be evidence-based and represent the needs of all species living, working, playing and otherwise becoming in wild spaces. However traditionally methods and frameworks are selected which intrinsically prioritise one perspective over another: satellite imagery maps macro vegetation and structures of the built environment; site-based ecological surveys for flora and fauna give some detail of which organisms dwell at particular sites; and participatory walking methods are increasingly being used to access the knowledge, perception and values of various human stakeholders. These methods stem from diverse disciplines between which there is little interaction or methodological integration, meaning perspectives are de facto incomplete. We need new ways to create maps which integrate empirical, ecological and geophysical data at scale, with personal, particular existences, experiences and knowledges of the myriad non-human and human species which both sustain and depend upon wild spaces. This chapter takes as its point of departure the multi-disciplinary project WILDSENS, which places the acoustic environment (or soundscape) as the locus of interaction of human and non-human actors and processes, biotic and abiotic processes. Set in the Arctic Lapland – one of Europe's largest remaining wildernesses – the project explores methods of listening at and across different scales as a means to integrate empirical and experiential methods, big and small data in the creation of maps of wilderness spaces, and participatory engagement in wild spaces. We describe the impetus, experience and initial insights from recent pilot field work in Abisko on the edge of Europe's largest remaining wilderness, in northern Swedish Lapland. With multi-disciplinary backgrounds in cultural anthropology, soundscape ecology, human geography and the environmental humanities, we carried out ethnographic and ecological methods to engage with the local landscape, wildlife and key local actors from the tourism sector, urban planning, climate research and communication. By figuring the soundscape as the locus of interaction, we consider possible ways to bring both social and ecological matters of concern into earshot for future generations.

Workplace digitalization created a sea change in work practices and it altered the situation of older workers. Digitalization entails the increased use of digital technologies, such as computers and online services. Older workers often possess limited digital skills, which may put their labor market participation at risk. Previous studies began exploring how older workers fare when their workplaces are digitalizing. However, the research field is still emerging and remains fragmented. This article comprises a systematic literature review that takes inventory of what we currently know about older workers in digitalizing workplaces. It demonstrates that older workers experience the digitalization of their workplaces in various areas, reaching from health monitoring to work arrangements. Interestingly, challenges and opportunities emerge in each area affected. This Janus-faced situation underlines the complexity of consequences, and it raises questions about social inequalities in these consequences. The work environment plays a crucial role in shaping how older workers experience workplace digitalization. It shapes which options for adaptation they have, and to which degree they can act on these options. This circumstance makes workplaces an excellent starting point for interventions. Country-characteristics likewise exert an influence. While characteristics such as retirement regulations are purposefully modified for intervention, other characteristics, such as culture, are not. This circumstance limits governmental options for shaping the situation of older workers in digitalizing workplaces. Future research should further explore the situation of older workers in digitalizing workplaces, paying special attention to the theoretical framework and to developments in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This work was supported by the Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (decision number 335111).

The essay maps and reflects on some dimensions of human-mosquito interaction in the context of the Arctic and inspired by fieldwork in Finnish Lapland. Rather than developing any particular argument, we seek to document this thinking mosquito as a collection of glimpses, fragments and musings. This impressionistic approach was inspired by conversations among the authors and with environmental humanities scholarship about the roles non-humans play in human worlds, and about how one might engage with mosquitos in thinking about scientific fieldwork, about everyday life in various environments, and about the Arctic more generally. The essay does not provide answers but rather questions, hoping as it does to offer some insights into the complexity of issues that connect mosquito worlds to human worlds. As a mirror to these reflections, we dialogue with excerpts from our own creative written thoughts from the field and from the diaries of German soldiers based in Lapland during the Second World War.

Slow food. Fast company. Real time. Live-stream. Quik Stop (or In-N-Out). Stop action. Slofie. Slow travel. The forms, tempos and rhythms of time are ever-present in contemporary socio-cultural life. The temporalities of contemporary experience are often heavily mediated by a range of socio-technical interventions. Through a range of human and digital processes, time is contested, enhanced, stretched, shrunk, played with and reconfigured. What do our perceptions, imaginations, experiences, practices of time do to the way we experience a given moment? And how do we subsequently represent that temporal experience to others? Through comparative digital ethnographic analysis across several two livestreaming travel experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, this chapter investigates the roles played by time in the process of practicing, producing and presenting momentary experiences to others through social media. In doing so, it seeks to explain how human sociality is altered by the mediation of time and space via digital platforms, novelly co-opting subjectivities of experience and its subjective representations. © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Annette Hill, Maren Hartmann and Magnus Andersson.

Broadly speaking, mobility refers to the socio-cultural processes surrounding movement. As a focus of anthropological research, mobility engages with the notion that human social worlds are in multiple states and forms of circulating spatial and temporal flux, and, as such, are variously implicated in trajectories of movement between and among human actors, physical objects and intangible information, ideas and capital. Mobility studies emerged out of the celebration of postmodernism and globalization, and their concomitant links to global flows of people and things in contexts of both migration and transnationalism. New forms of human interaction and engagement amid sea changes in the capacity for people, things, and representations to move fast and far have led to new intellectual theorizations, perspectives, approaches, and provocations, denoting mobility as a new point of departure for contemporary analyses of the social world in the 21st century. Since the early 2000s, scholars have worked to develop the theoretical underpinnings of a “new mobilities” paradigm which would, in turn, lead to a “mobility turn” in the social sciences and beyond. The paradigm challenges a number of assumptions within the social sciences including the static, bounded concepts of culture and society as a unit of analysis, the assumed center-periphery nature of movement of peoples from developing to developed areas of the world, and the close association of mobility with freedom (and immobility with oppression). Studies of mobility go far beyond researching mere movement, and now even comparatively sedentary concepts such as society and nation are being upended with interlinked, shifting, and mobile things, ideas, and individuals. Mobility research has been characteristically cross-disciplinary, finding traction early on in the fields of sociology and geography before being taken up by the theoretical considerations and ethnographic research of social and cultural anthropologists (though of course studying movement—of both humans and non-humans—was nothing new for anthropologists). Scholarship across distinct strands of mobility research has fostered dialogue among otherwise spatting social science fields, and scholars from other disciplines, such as cultural and migration studies, tourism and transport studies, media studies, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) have also made important contributions to literature on mobility that is either anthropological in focus or approach, or heavily used by anthropologists in their mobility scholarship. Because research into mobility comprises such a wide range of area specializations, theoretical interests, and methodological approaches, however, exactly what constitutes mobility research can mean different things to different scholars in different disciplines—from research on communities of people who physically move for their jobs (e.g., commuters, expatriates, or seasonal agricultural workers) to studies of societal systems, infrastructures, and regimes such as vehicular transport or border control. And, as expected, the normative categories established by a number of scholars of mobility to study the field have themselves received no small amount of critique from anthropologists for their privileging certain types of mobile movement and deprecating others. This bibliography outlines the scope of literature on mobility that is particularly anthropological in its approach, method, and object, while also considering some of the seminal works in sociology and geography that have both influenced anthropological thinking on mobility and proven foundational to the development of the “mobility turn” in the social sciences more generally. There is inherently overlap between some of the sections set up here (e.g., Migration and Labor and Work), but they have been structured via these categories more to facilitate reader accessibility than to set up any hard and fast distinctions for how the scholarship discussed in this article should be framed or understood.

This panel introduces and critically examines the concept of "digital placemaking" as practices that create emotional attachments to place through digital media use. As populations and the texts they produce become increasingly mobile, such practices are proliferating, and a striking array of applications and uses have emerged which exploit the affordances of mobile media to foster an ability to navigate, understand, connect to, and gain a sense of belonging and familiarity in place. The concept of digital placemaking is both a theoretical and applied response to the spatial fragmentation, banal physical environments, and community disintegration thought to have accompanied the speed and scale of globalization—the implications of which include suggestions that our collective sense of place has been disrupted, leaving people unsure of their belonging within conditions and boundaries that seem increasingly fluid. While it is imperative to attend to the shifting social, economic, and political conditions that give rise to such concerns, it is also necessary to recognize the many ways people actually use digital media to negotiate differential mobilities and become placemakers. Papers in this interdisciplinary panel consider digital placemaking through a range of perspectives investigating lived experiences of assorted communities with disparate social and economic power to demonstrate how digital media can facilitate social and geographic boundary crossing while encouraging new ways of placing ourselves—symbolically, virtually, or through co-located presence.

This panel adds the question of emerging and changing socialities to the broader nexus of mobilities and mobile communication studies, using the emerging concept of "mobilie socialities." "Mobile socialities" demarcates a new constellation of media scholarship that seeks to encapsulate human subjectivities of media as they are embedded in human processes, structures and experiences of mobility and sociality. The concept speaks to and critically builds upon notions of ‘networked individualism’ (Rainie & Wellman, 2012), ‘network sociality’ (Wittel 2001) and ‘mediated mobilism’ (Hartmann 2013) to conceptualize productive ways of studying the social lives inherent in digitally mediated structures, subjectivities and practices of mobility. The four ethnographic papers on this panel develop this emerging concept through important topics including migration, experience, temporality, and precarity. In addressing the phenomena of people on the move and the role (or not) of mobile media in everyday instances of mobility and sociality, this panel contributes to a broader understanding of differing types of ‘mobile figures’ in networked times.

The Anthropocene is fundamentally a social imaginary that is both shaped by and is reshaping tourism practice. In this article, we enroll the concept of the anthropocenic imaginary to describe how ...

In this paper we examine chronopolitics—the politics of time—as a means of understanding the politicized ways in which multiple, diverse temporalities mediate tourism practice, discourse and imagination. By linking heterotemporalities with geopolitical discourses, we illustrate how temporality is geopolitically graphed—that is to say, the ways in which time becomes politicized through and in spaces. We do this by elucidating the role that various times play in three areas of discourse central to tourism practice: authenticity, capitalism and ecology. This work contributes to emerging debates surrounding the geopolitics of tourism by foregrounding the role politicized temporalities play in tourism, informing geopolitical practice and imaginaries of place.

Despite the abundant attention paid to analysing and critically discussing travel texts, and the attention to tourism practices, a surprising lacuna exists around the industry that fuels the production and circulation of travel writing and photography. If tourism, as Franklin [2008 Franklin, Adrian. 2008. “The Tourism Ordering.” Civilisations 57: 25–39. doi: 10.4000/civilisations.1288 [CrossRef] . “The Tourism Ordering.” Civilisations 57: 25–39.] has argued, is about the ordering of desire, then questioning how the desire to travel is imagined, experienced and stimulated by producers of travel literature should enable us to address how tourism imaginaries, expectations, powers and practices are reproduced, and by whom. In this article, we argue that close attention to the everyday practices of travel journalism can highlight the kinds of ethical positions, compromises and frameworks that shape the texts that circulate, and in so doing reveal how particular tropes and stereotypes are created and replicated.

In this article, we discuss the role played by graffiti in representing, fomenting and studying binary and non-binary sentiments of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Through asocio-textual analysis of examples of public anti-gentrification and anti-touristification protest graffiti in Berlin, we consider the complex layers of history, identity, mobility, community and environment which have been folded onto one another throughout the city over the past decades. By investigating the textual politics of belonging and self as shown through the lens of graffiti, we argue that representational analyses of so-called banal public texts can help to comprehend the complexities that lie behind binary socio-cultural categories (e.g. local/non-local. In exploring some of the defining characteristics that distinguish ecocritical from environmental humanities approaches to critique, the article posits how multiple disciplines—even those well outside humanities subjects—might well be able to benefit from the humanities’ distinct approaches to cultural, or indeed social, analysis. QC 20190603

Existing research has demonstrated that capturing stakeholder attitudes to landscape may be most accurately performed in the field, in spite of the challenges this brings (Evans and Jones 2011). The use of innovative walking methods is emerging as a key tool for understanding experiences of and relationships with landscape and place. In conservation biology, these and other mobile methods have used underlying spatial data to develop a landscape typology, then spatially tagged and captured stakeholder attitudes in relation to that typology in-situ (Scott et al. 2009). This poster presentation describes our forthcoming research in Abisko, Sweden, which seeks to blend bio-acoustic methods with participatory mapping in order to comprehensively capture stakeholders’ perceptions of, knowledge about and attitudes towards dynamic Arctic environments. The use of this multi-sensory, participatory mapping methodology, which amalgamates experiential human data with empirical ecological survey data, can advance understanding of the complex interactions between society, environment and place in modern conservation approaches (Zia et al. 2015). This interdisciplinary and collaborative research project aims to engage research subjects in active, sensory roles for the co-creation of mutually beneficial knowledge. By complementing existing geophysical/ ecological surveys with insights into local community land-values using ethnographic methods, we build capacity for understanding the impact of environmental change on local communities within the Arctic, whilst developing a new methodology for broader use in the future co-production of sustainable land-management policies internationally. Furthermore, involving people in co-created conservation tools such as wildness maps may be one way of addressing the multiple conflicts currently surrounding wild land and wild species

In this article, we foreground chronopolitics – the politics of time – to examine the ways in which the heterotemporalities of Burmese exiles living in nine “temporary shelters” along the Thai–Burma (Myanmar) border mediate one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world. The imminent repatriation of these Burmese exiles, tens of thousands of whom have been waiting for decades to be resettled to an often elusive third country or to return to a peaceful Burma, has given way to a preeminent “crisis of hope.” The perception that the camps are “out of time” has diverted critical funding streams away from border-related issues and into Burma itself, which has led to a widespread shift in focus for thousands of NGOs in the region. It is within this temporal and spatial context that we argue that the political economy of hope is deeply entangled in the geoeconomics of Burma’s “opening up” to systems of global capital. The forestalled realizations of exiles’ hopes and potential futures are inextricably linked to not only geoeconomic change but also to the shifting foci of NGOs and stakeholders in the region towards liberalization policies and projects in Burma and away from Burma’s exile populations. In this way, along Thai–Burma border, the political economy of hope articulates with chronopolitics in ways that shed new light on the politics and temporalities of refugeedom.

Hyland, Richard. 2009. Gifts: A Study in Comparative Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. xxi+708 p. ISBN-13: 978-0195343366, £80.Book Review: Lori Allen, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine, xviii, 258 pp. bibliogr. Stanford Studies in Human Rights, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2013. $85 (cloth), $24.95 (paper).Lucht, Hans. 2012. Darkness before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today. Berkeley: University of California Press. Isbn 0520270738, xxii, 284 pp, price: $26.95

This paper considers the impact of shared imaginaries of mobility among so-called elite, mobile professionals — early-career expatriates living in Nepal for a period of one to three years. Based on 18 months of fieldwork among expatriates in Kathmandu, I explore the ways in which these actors construct, navigate and narrativise the boundaries between themselves and the many tourists who visit Nepal each year. While in some transnational contexts, these guests may seek to align themselves with other guests such as tourists and foreign residents as a means of asserting and expressing shared commonalities of transnationality and mobility, expatriates in Kathmandu are keen to highlight perceived distance between themselves and other guests as much as they are the perceived proximities between themselves and native Nepalis. In focusing on this former interaction, I show that tourist imaginaries become important means for expatriates to negotiate difference as they learn their new local identities in a context of spatial and temporal transience. Though the academic literatures of migration and tourism have developed more or less in isolation from one another, these two spheres of mobility are in fact very much interrelated. I suggest that anthropological research into the self-conceptions of mobile professionals take into consideration other non-local groups with whom they share local spaces, since these actors can be used instrumentally as a means of strengthening both group and individual identities. If anthropology engages effectively with the interactions between hosts and guests in colonial spaces, I argue that just as much can be gleaned by looking at engagements between guests and other guests. Through a consideration of these border zones of encounter, anthropologists can illustrate ethnographically how individual expatriate identities are negotiated within communities of elite, mobile professionals.

Despite continued heavy state subsidies, Russian and Norwegian mining operations in the Svalbard archipelago occupy increased strategic importance given recent heightened tensions between the two nations. At the same time, the industries of scientific research and adventure tourism are growing in importance to Svalbard’s economic self-sufficiency. This chapter explores recent geoeconomic changes in the archipelago within the contexts of shifting relationships between Russia and Norway, and of a global Anthropocenic consciousness. Considering the histories of the archipelago’s settlements of Barentsburg and Longyearbyen, and of the Russian (Arktikugol) and Norwegian (Store Norske) mining companies, the chapter explores linkages between the industries that fuel Svalbard’s settlements, the international geopolitical interest in the region, and the symbolic and real value of resource extraction within broader Arctic geopolitical discourse.