Tarja Tuulia Salmela
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Stillingsbeskrivelse
I'm working as a postdoctoral research fellow during years 2021-2024 in the Traveling Post-Corona research project (https://uit.no/project/reiselivet-post-corona). My research focuses on a growingly popular, mobile and 'alternative' lifestyle called vanlife. Being curious about how campervans become minimal homes for people with various backgrounds and motivations for vanlife, and how they encounter places where they travel, I aim to form a dialogue between global and local, place-sensitive, approaches to the lifestyle. Importantly, I aim to theoretically deepen the understandings of vanlife from a mere form of travel and explore its post-anthropocentric potentialities.
I treat vanlife as a way of relating to the more-than-human world that allows us 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. Campervans 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 study is not blind to the ecological, social and and political challenges that vanlife as a nomadic lifestyle holds 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.
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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.