Emotional Geographies of Interrailing: Co-enacting experiences

This inquiry extends the current ‘mobilities turn’ (e.g. Bauman, 2000; Cresswell, 2006; Sheller and Urry, 2004; Urry, 2007) within the study of social science by critically studying the transformative powers of the productions and performances within the ‘borderless’ (yet, multiply bordered) emotional geographies of international train travelscapes. By doing so it challenges conventional intranational ethnographic accounts in social sciences by delineating what might be perceived as the ‘container of culture’. Here, the ‘movement-driven’ and multi-sited ethnography uses the power of numerous international and transverse ‘mobile cultures’ and social networks to examine and nuance the (re)creation of mundane train compartments, in order to empirically substantiate an academic field highly inspired by grand theorizations of mobility – orchestrated by prolific writers such as John Urry and Zygmunt Baumann. Set within the focus areas of the Tourism Research Unit (TRU) it interrelates consumer studies and cultural encounters by investigating how multiple perceptions of ‘place’ and ‘spatiality’ translate into socio-cultural effects and practices triggering the creation of the emotional geographies of the train travel. By doing so, it also explores innovative mobile methods useful to encapsulate enactments and negotiations between actors within the empirical terrain of train compartments.