NORTHSENSE: Materialities and Mobilities of the North through Innovative Sensory Ethnographic Methods

This project develops a new research focus on the materiality of the senses. Using novel sensory and mobile ethnographic methods, this project comprises a transdisciplinary study of mobility practices in Fennoscandia and beyond, paying particular attention to shifting global and local perspectives on sustainability following the COVID-19 pandemic. It considers the viability and trajectory of tourism futures and the role to be played therein by local, national and international actors. It merges practice-based and applied approaches to sustainable development through case studies considered via anthropological study of everyday affect and performance. It uses innovative methodological approaches from the environmental humanities and media studies, in particular emerging critical, experimental work on silence and visuality. By empowering citizen perspectives on local economic development, the project will generate new tools for understanding human-environment relations that will enable studying emerging forms of sustainable connections among, humans, more-than-humans and landscapes. As such, it focuses on expanding research in three primary topic areas: 1) the social and environmental politics of mobility and infrastructure; 2) the role of new, networked and digital forms of social encounter in human environment relations; 3) affective and sensory understandings of ecologies and wellbeing. The methodological approaches for this project draw from cultural anthropology, media studies and the environmental humanities, bringing innovative, transdisciplinary approaches to studying contemporary configurations of transnationalism and place.