Enthusiasts' travel : mobilities and practices

• Main Author: Hui, Allison Tanya
• Published: Lancaster University 2011
• Subjects: 306.4819
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.618331

While it is widely accepted that people travel not for the sake of travel, but in order to do various things, the relationship between travel and everyday practices is not well understood. My research project investigates the underexplored and dynamic relationship between everyday practice and travel, focusing in particular upon how the multiple mobilities of people, objects, images and skills condition and constrain performances of practices. In this work, I incorporate and extend concepts from theories of practice (Schatzki, Bourdieu, Reckwitz, Shove), the new mobilities paradigm (Sheller and Urry), anthropology (Ingold) and time-geography (Hagerstrand). Drawing upon semi-structured qualitative interviews and participant observation of bird watching and patchwork quilting, as well as literature on leisure walking and Ashtanga yoga, I explore the interactions between situated performances of leisure and the circulation of the elements that-make up each practice, showing for instance how the objects of leisure change participants' networked travelling. In addition to offering compelling proof of how people do not independently choose, but are rather compelled to travel. this thesis demonstrates how travel is the collective product of people and practices. and confirms the importance of relational arid practice-specific understandings of travel. By theorizing travel as not only general movement through objective space, but also networked circulations of practice-specific elements, this research provides concepts and approaches that can be taken up in the future to re-frame the challenges of curbing unsustainable travel and widening participation in socially desirable practices. This research has been gratefully supported by the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in the United Kingdom, British Sociological Association Support Fund, Lancaster University F ASS POR Conference Travel Fund, William Ritchie Travel Fund Grant, and Lancaster University Department of Sociology Travel Grant.