Non-representational geography and extreme weather: tourist bodies and places in a changing climate

This chapter outlines how non-representational research can be better equipped theoretically and methodically to research on and in extreme weather. Inspired by recent extreme weather events, we conceptualise how tourists affectively experience extreme heat through their different situated ‘sweaty bodies’ (Low, 2005) that are part social, cultural and biological. By linking phenomenological understandings of weather (Vannini et al., 2012; Ingold, 2007) with non-representational theory (Thrift, 2008) in the context of tourism studies, our chapter develops a new methodical approach to studying the relations between human subjects and the more-than-representational forces of extreme weather worlds. We call this approach weather ethnography. The approach represents an agile approach to non-representational research on weather and consists of two interlinked dimensions: ‘following-the-weather’ and ‘researching-in-the-weather’. This chapter presents the theoretical and practical considerations of weather ethnography with a few ethnographic vignettes of how heat and storms can cause bodily discomfort and destroy tourism places.