Tarja Tuulia Salmela
Stillingsbeskrivelse
My work is focused on re-visiting central concepts and practices of tourism and travel through feminist new materialism and posthuman feminism. In my current projects I participate in decolonizing storytelling practices within the context of road trip travel, long-term travel cultures and route tourism. My work situates in the Northern Highlands of Scotland, and Lofoten and Helgeland in Northern Norway.
During years 2021-2025 I'm working as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Traveling Post-Corona research project (https://uit.no/project/reiselivet-post-corona). There, my research focuses particularly on rapidly growing mobile lifestyles and long-term traveling cultures. I'm curious about how campervans and other inhabitable vehicles become minimal homes for people with various backgrounds and motivations for a life on the road, and how they encounter places where they travel.
I treat long-term travel and vehicle dwelling cultures as a way to re-visit our taken-for-granted assumptions of normality in regards of fixity and permanence. This has implications to the ways we conceive travel and the meaning of destinations and their management. Dwellable vehicles with their material assemblages can lead us to understand relational composition of places that can enrichen our current ways of understanding and relating to destinations. The project is not blind to the ecological, social and and political challenges that vehicle dwelling cultures hold and it calls for research that brings into light the complexities embedded in the tension between freedom, destination management and local housing and camping politics.
I am also part of the SAMIKUN project ran by the Nord University. In the project, we work together with Sámi creative industries and tourism companies to critically evaluate the current dominating, western conceptualizations of sustainability. Moreover, we work towards creating, and documenting, situated, place-sensitive conceptualizations of sustainability that are rooted in Sámi culture. These are conceptualizations that are created, and stories that are told, by the Sámi people themselves - in contrast to conceptualizations being posed on them.
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Forskningsinteresser
Current research focus: vanlife, nomadic theories, relational place-making, indigenous onto-epistemologies, post-anthropocentric methodological developments
Previous and ongoing research interests: sleep and dreaming, sleep market, neoliberality and tracking technologies, animals and responsible tourism, proximity tourism, research with trees and deadwood
Theoretical map guiding my research: Feminist new materialisms, relational ontologies, posthumanist theories, indigenous onto-epistemologies, post-anthropocentric theorizing, critical tourism studies, critical organization studies, new mobilities
Undervisning
REI 3014 Qualitative method
The aim of this course is to provide students with insights into qualitative research methods. Students will be trained in defining research problems, designing a research-project, conducting interviews/fieldworks as well as how to reflect upon methodological questions involved in qualitative research.
REI-3012 Nature and tourism in an era of climate change
This course focus on nature and tourism in the era of climatic change. In addition it engage in how climate change affects Arctic destinations, and the innovative solutions tourist companies and sites are involved in. The course discusses social, environmental and ethics aspects of nature use in tourism economies. Discussions will concern the range of new concepts and activities that engage in reframing contemporary travelling such as ecotourism, sustainable tourism and responsible tourism.