Sensing interrail mobility: Towards multimodal methodologies

Tourism encapsulates human experiences driven by desires, affective urges and sensuous dispositions. This dissertation is a hymn to the embodied and affective experiences of one particular mode of tourism mobility, interrail. I suggest that mobility means much more than functional movement between A and B. Rather, mobility is explored as a socio-material, embodied and non-representational experience set in the mundanity of ordinary train travel. While such everyday experience may appear banal as we come across them they are in no ways trivial. By adopting and developing innovative and multimodal methodologies, this doctoral thesis explores the analytical prospects of non-representational theories in tourism research. The dissertation points toward a richer understanding of the ‘social’ which encompasses under-researched topics such as the implications of affective atmospheres, the sensuous and vibrant materialities. Consequently, this doctoral work wrestles with questions pertaining to the ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies of tourism research, and extends and contributes to post-structural movements in tourism studies.

Martin Trandberg Jensen is part of the Tourism Research Unit at the Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University, Campus Copenhagen. ’Sensing interrail mobility: Towards multimodal methodologies’ is his Ph.d. dissertation.