Engaging with mobile methods: Tourism research and the production of the mobile

This chapter showcases how mobile methods are more than calibrated techniques awaiting application by tourism researchers, but productive in the enactment of the mobile (Law and Urry, 2004). Drawing upon recent findings deriving from a PhD course on mobility and mobile methods it reveals the conceptual ambiguousness of the term ‘mobile methods’. In order to explore this ambiguousness the chapter provides a number of examples deriving from tourism research, to explore how mobile methods are always entangled in ideologies, predispositions, conventions and practice-realities. Accordingly, the engagements with methods are acknowledged to be always political and contextual, reminding us to avoid essentialist discussions regarding research methods. Finally, the chapter draws on recent fieldwork to extend developments in mobilities-oriented tourism research, by employing auto-ethnography to call for a deeper sensitivity to the all-but-purposive, occasionally unintentional, even vulnerable, role of embodiment in critical mobilities research.