This is a post-referred final draft. When citing, please refer to the published version:

Jensen, M. T. (2014) Chapter 5. Engaging with mobile methods: Tourism research and the production of the mobile. In: J. W. Meged, B. S. Blichfeldt, L. A. Hansen and K. S. Hvass (eds.) Tourism Methodologies – New Perspectives, Practices and Procedures (pp. 77-96).

Copenhagen Business Press.

Chapter 5. Engaging with mobile methods: Tourism research and the production of the mobile

By Martin Trandberg Jensen

Abstract 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. Key words: Mobile methods, Mobilities, Performativity, Non-Representational Theories Introduction

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‘What makes up mobile methods?’ – The introductory remark echoes in the seminar room, while the eager PhD organizers await the inputs from the upcoming generation of researchers in front of them – spanning from mobility and architectural students, urban planners to tourism stipends. A momentary silence indulges the room, but after some seemingly long seconds, a stipend remarks: ‘travel logs!’, tuning down the partly tense atmosphere of a group of young researchers yet to know each other. A few moments later another participant follows; ‘ethnographic participation ... interviews’ – only to be immediately extended by yet another; ‘mapping and following!’.

‘All the better, all the better …’, the professor remarks while observing the epitome of the seminar room, the blackboard (Fig 1), encircled with multifarious notions from the audience. Abruptly the theme turns towards the apparent capacities of mobile methods as a stipend boldly remarks; ‘Uncovering black boxes!’. The professor smiles, excitingly wearing down the chalk in his hands. The comment spurs some final outbursts, such as: ‘Critique/re-imagining’; ‘open-mindedness’ and ‘capturing complexities’, before the session slowly transforms into a more formal introduction of participants.

This opening example – together with the ambiguous mementos on the blackboard – raise two central discussions that have been raised by other mobilities-oriented researchers recently (e.g. Büscher, Urry and Witchger, 2011; Fincham, McGuiness and Murray, 2010), yet remains to be contemplated upon in regards to tourism research: What are mobile methods? What can mobile methods do? But especially relevant for the following discussion: How are more or less mobile realities produced by our engagement with methods? The latter implying that mobile methods are more than calibrated applications to research, but also performances which influence the production of knowledge. Seen as such, this chapter turns to the latter question by decisively avoiding to make a conceptual order out of the ambiguous answers provided on the blackboard, but leaves room for multiple versions of ‘the mobile’. By doing so acknowledging that (mobile) methods are in fact producing ‘messy’ – yet equally important – realities (Law, 2004) serving not to be too stringently conceptualized. Accordingly, this chapter argues that it might prove fruitful to trace back (some of) the tourism research domains that have taken part in generating knowledge on the basis of mobile methods. Not only does such a depiction give room for multiple versions of mobile methods, it also exemplifies how mobile methods are entangled in theoretical (and indeed philosophical) affairs and conventions, not to mention very basic practice-realities (which is however not the outspoken agenda of this chapter to uncover). In the following three streams of tourism research engaging with mobile methods will be explored. One privileges traces and routes across stable space; while one tones down a movement-based ontology residing in structural predispositions; finally, the latter plugs into current writings in especially the mobilities-driven (Urry, 2001) research domain in order to propose how mobile methods can also take very expressive, performative and embodied shapes. Extending the final discussion, the chapter concludes by drawing on recent auto-ethnographic findings to call for a deeper sensitivity to the all-but-purposive, occasionally unintentional, even vulnerable, role of embodiment in critical mobilities research. Accordingly, the chapter suggests that there are ‘no blueprint for how to do fieldwork’ (Pink, 2007, p. 5) and no predisposed master plan for how the engagement with mobile methods occurs. As a result, parallel realities are produced, parallel research aims pursued, – and consequently, multiple representations recorded on blackboards at PhD seminars. The key argument remains to showcase some of such parallel manifestations within tourism research, in order to stress the co-existing ontologies of mobility and the consequent political act of doing methods in more or less mobile fashions. The ‘savoir faire’ of tourism-as-mobilities research Together with the ‘mobilities turn’ (Urry, 2001) in-and-around tourism research a range of mobile methods have been applied to document the increasingly relational and performative nature of tourism. Infrequently touched upon it serves to briefly note some of the more recent sources of methodical inspiration from which this ‘turn’ borrows. Extending the thoughts of Creswell and Merriman (2004) the popularity of mobilities-driven research is more a matter of revisiting an old friend. Remember,

ethnographers and anthropologists have been on the move for decades without marking their methodical territories with notions of ‘shadowing’, ‘walk-along’, ‘follow-the-thing’ or other varieties of ‘moving-with’ configurations. It was – and arguably still is – implied tenets of such disciplines, even more popularised following the critical turn in ethnography gaining popularity with the publication of Clifford and Marcus’s publication Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986). Admittedly, Büscher and Urry (2009) does go as far as to argue that: ‘…Marcus’ ‘multi-sited ethnography’ approaches some of this when he refers to ‘chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions’ (1995: 105)…’. Surely, one could extend the discussion of sources of influence, but for now, the point remains to simply stress the methodical interconnectedness of more traditional disciplines with current progressive research streams, e.g. as embedded within ‘the mobilities turn’. So, rather than trying to trace down the disciplinary source that put the ‘mobile’ into methods (which would be an unfruitful – and quite contradictory – trajectory anyway), this chapter rather experiments with the idea that ideologies, research conventions and practice-realities take part in enacting various tourism representations. By making such a perceptual turn the discussion moves from one which privileges how a variety of mobile methods make it possible to document empiricist conceptualizations of ‘the mobile’, to one which rather addresses how ‘the mobile’, itself, is in fact produced by methods relationally distributed and made productive. Such an approach destabilizes whatever clear definitions might exist of mobile methods as inheriting essential capacities in need of (objective) application. In connection to this, three points of specific concern have to be raised when dealing with mobility and mobile methods. Firstly, and by now most obviously, mobile methods should not simply be perceived as predetermined methods with certain inherent capacities. Rather, there are methods put into politics, and the relational dynamics and consequences should be the readdressed focus of our methodological discussions. There are no innocent methods (Law, 2004). Accordingly, and vice-versa, interviews transform into ‘walk and talks’; observation studies into ‘follow the actor’; and ethnography goes ‘multi-sited’ as they are entangled with disciplinary (in)conventions and research practices. The second one is of philosophical nature, and relates to the prolific production of mobilities-driven cases utilizing the wide range of transformed methods as presented above. David Bissell argues that the proliferation of researchers seeing realities as based upon ever relational (im)mobilities runs the risk of privileging‘… a specific type of narration that obscures and potentially negates a range of phenomena which … are integral to the understanding of what it is to experience movement’ (Bissel, 2010, p. 54). Consequently, he calls for a careful application of such paradigmatic naming that risks giving mobile essence to subjectivities whose movements might be essentially narrated by less-agentive and less-active factors such as corporeal fatigue, hunger or lethargy etc. Arguably, the logic of movement has provided an evocative vocabulary with which to insightfully address a variety of mobilities-driven inquiries, yet a potential realm of passiveness and indifference becomes less obvious when confining ones perspective on knowledge as that of always-already mobile. For such reasons we must continuously reflect on our own – highly productive – engagement with methods. Performing methods have repercussions that influence and fixates (at least temporarily) the ontology pursued – strengthened and supported by the literary exercise of e.g. putting findings into a codified language consisting of evocative metaphors such as ‘mobilities’, ‘fluidity, ‘moorings’, ‘flows’ etc. Extending this, and drawing on Law and Urry (2004) and Law (2004) the argument is no longer that mobile methods discover and depict realities-out-there, they also produce them. Accordingly, mobile methods are not simple rules or procedures but bundles of orchestrated hinterlands (Law, 2004) that stretch through skills, practices, instruments and routines to take part in enacting certain social realities.

The critique raised by John Law connects closely to the argument of De Certeau (1984, p. 68) who criticizes method – the seed of modern science – for ordering a ‘savoir-faire’ within the academia. That is, modes of inquiry based upon practices articulated by discourse and to a lesser extent practices based upon those whose voices are yet to be articulated (the researched). In order to reduce the discussion the following will employ three illustrative examples focusing on a variety of engagements with (mobile) methods in tourism research. By doing so it discusses how tourism realities have been, and still are, produced and represented through the relational work of putting methods into, for example, disciplinary discourses (which is the primary source of relational work discussed here). Accordingly, one might say they represent examples of the ‘savoir faire’ coexisting in the realms of mobilities and tourism research. Euclidean spaces of tourism research Deriving from geography, ICT and transport studies, several researchers have engaged with mobile methods to map out precise movements of tourists across absolute space. Asakuro and Iryo (2007) apply GPS tracking devices to illustrate the movement patterns of 56 students in an urban sightseeing area in Kobe, Japan. Arguing that tourist behaviour is more complex than ordinary commuting or shopping behaviour, they set out to define the topological characteristics of tourist behaviour in order to enhance the development of traffic demand management and policies. Similarly, Ahas et al. (2007) acknowledge mobile positioning based data as a powerful new source for tourism geographies. By utilizing mobile telephone positioning data to stimulate a description of tourist flows that goes beyond the traditional indicators of a number of visitors and overnight stays at various accommodation facilities, they examine the patterns of foreign tourists visiting the Estonian city of Tartu. Conforming to the EU principles of confidentiality of information, they use two years of generalized roaming data from a telephone operator to cartographically carve out popular tourist zones of the region, while discussing the effects of certain festive events on mobile activity. In line with this, Nagao et al. (2004) criticizes the fact that many regional tourism policies in Japan have often been based upon macro statistics (inflow of tourists; transportation type). Seeking better data, they apply GPS logs consisting of date, time, latitude and longitude information, drawn from tourists utilizing a rent-a-car scheme to describe various characteristics of the measured movements while visualizing cartographic patterns. Finally, one of the more experimental takes is provided by O’Connor et al. (2005) who set out to track tourists in a national park in Victoria, Australia. Integrating race timing equipment, ankle transmitters and even a sensor pad registering tourists passing it, they discuss overarching movement schemas, trying to locate distinct typologies based upon a variety of variables. From a tourism research perspective, Shoval and Isaacson (2007) provide a contribution on how to track the spatial and temporal behaviour of tourists by using three case studies (Heidelberg, Jerusalem and Nazareth) to investigate the capacities of three tracking devices: Cellular triangulation tracking; GPS tracking and TDOA (land-based tracking devices). Importantly, they also promote a number of previously published tourism papers using tracking methods that are not necessarily technologically fuelled (as the ones above), yet carried out with a similar goal in mind; mapping and categorizing tourist behaviour in relation to a geographically defined area. These writings include Keul and Kühberger’s (1997) tracking of Salzburg tourists based upon non-participatory observations counting motion and stationary data, and relating this to socio-demographic data deriving from latter interviews. Hartmann’s (1988) attempt to combine interviews, observation studies and aerial pictures to examine the dynamics of recreational travel of American and Canadian tourists moving in the city of Munich. Finally, there are the wide array of researchers using the systematic time-space approaches (such as time-space diaries; and recall interviews/questionnaires) to map the behavioural characteristics of tourists across a wide variety of demarcated settings (Fennel, 1996; Thornton et al., 1997; Cooper, 1981; Debbage, 1991).

Armed with a vocabulary, including words such as ‘tracking’, ‘routes’, ‘distance’, ‘coordinates’ and ‘time-space patterns’, the upper examples fixates mobile realities as those which can be mapped cartographically in a Euclidian space (in connection with this, the promising integration of cyber-technologies that topologically map e.g. controversies. forces us to rethink what makes up virtual (relative) space, but this remains untouched in this chapter). Above all, a main tenet of such methodical affairs lay in their capacities to track movements across time and space. Here, actors are often entities with an ontological essence – of directed moving. They are movements, and often represented as lines across a given space. As a counter-exposition, and from a different mobilities-oriented discourse (proving just as guilty in politicizing mobile methods to their dogmas), a counter exposition is provided by the British anthropologist, Tim Ingold. In his anthropological study of the influential power of ‘the line’, he provides useful reflections from various contexts, arguing that ‘Indeed, it is in the very nature of lines that they always seem to wiggle free of any classification one might seek to impose ...’ (2007, p. 50). This argument sheds similarities with the relational geographical thoughts of Doreen Massey (2005, p. 111); ‘On the road map you won’t drive off the edge of your known world. In space as I want to imagine it, you just might’. Seen as such tourists not only travel through space or across it, they take part in spatializing (Ibid.) it through active practices. The overall argument remains to acknowledge how mobility and the engagement with mobile methods operate as a ‘technology of power’ (Harley, 1988), e.g. taming the tourist to the synchrony of cartographic structures, or letting lose the relational dynamics of tourism spaces as always-in-the-making. Polarized spaces of tourism research Set in a different context it is interesting to notice how tourism, arguably a rather mobile phenomenon, has been distilled in numerous seminal, but rather passive (as not dealing with movements), ethnographies. In 1976, Dean MacCannell reflected upon the methodical underpinnings of his, by now, classic book, ‘The Tourist’ stating: ‘So I undertook to follow the tourists, sometimes joining their groups, sometimes watching them from afar ...’ (MacCannell, 1976, p. 4), indicating the multi-sited ethnographical backbone behind his work. Although methods are not outspokenly engaged with, he instead draws out a number of discrete touristic (to borrow a MacCannell term) concepts inspired by the dualism of structural anthropology (Levi-Strauss, 1974). Inspired by Goffmann’s structural divisions of social establishments, MacCannell argues that ‘Touristic consciousness is motivated by its desire for authentic experiences…’ (1976, p. 101), in which they manifest as either back- or front-stage experiences. Similar to such accounts, one will see that the characteristics of increasing amount of publications during especially the 1970s and 1980s appeared inspired by assumptions of tourism as an event polarized to ‘the home’. Many of such studies appear to follow a mantra of tourists as a ‘temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change’ (Smith, 1977, p. 2). Another example extending such dualism (although less empirical) is Cohen’s phenomenology of tourist experiences (1979) which defines five tourist modes ranked according to a spectrum in which tourists either travel in pursuit of mere pleasure to the quest for meaning. Although such renderings surely has their merits, especially in terms of their spell-binding illustrative powers, they might also be charged for spatializing tourism experiences as already embedded in theorized polarizations (‘either/or’ configurations), leaving the mobile to a mere practical matter to overcome in order to produce a highly intellectualized depiction of tourism as an abstraction of e.g. ‘everyday life’ or the postmodern society. Consequently, the engagement with mobile methods is dominated by dualistic (pre)dispositions, serving as a rather structural account fixing tourists as ‘passive’ archetypes or meta-sociological models (MacCannell, 1976). Mobile methods thus become a functional

necessity (we move simply to follow tourists), yet as a sociological concept, mobility is analytically silenced in favour of theorizing tourism by e.g. drawing on Marxism and structuralism. However, during the last decade or so a wave of critical research targeted at challenging more conventional approaches to tourism research has taken part in creating yet a new ‘savoire-faire’ of tourism research engaged with mobile methods. Performative and embodied spaces of tourism research Recent calls made by the founding and present editors of Annals of Tourism Research have called for attention to the ‘embodied emotions, performances and affects that are an integral part of being tourist’ (Xiao et al., 2013, p. 373). While such call is surely acknowledged, one must only briefly turn to the relevant literature produced to notice that the call has been heeded by several researchers, for several years. Among them are the key developments made in the continuous attempts to intertwine mobilities (herein also matters of performativity and embodiment) into the study of tourism. Such has called for a renewed interest in many of the methods originally applied within classic anthropology and ethnographic work – within and around tourism research – yet attuned to a new relational understanding of tourism-as-mobilities or performativities. Employing methods sensitive to the performative, embodied, material and relational geographic dimensions of tourism cultures, authors have rendered visible a wide array of tourism manifestations yet to be accounted for. To mention but a few this includes the embodied performances of photographing (Haldrup and Larsen, 2003; Larsen, 2005) and of tourist places/spaces in general (Bærenholdt, Haldrup, Larsen and Urry, 2004); the corporeality of second-home holidays (Haldrup, 2004); ways of embodying and identifying Britishness in Spanish charters (Andrews, 2005); the role of listening in the process of connecting festival spaces and people (Duffy et al., 2011); Dann and Jacobsen (2003) describe the crafting of places through smells, while Scarles (2010) examines the powers of visual (auto)ethnography as a methodical key to examine embodied tourist performances. A characteristic of such and similar work deals with developing new ways through which to overcome the points of critique raised by Law and Urry in 2004:

Social science deal poorly … with the fleeting – that which is here today and gone tomorrow … with the distributed – that is to be found here and there but not in between – or that which slips and slides between one place and another. They deal poorly with the multiple – that which takes different shapes in different places. They deal poorly with the non-causal, the chaotic, the complex … with the sensory – that which is subject to vision, sound, taste, smell; with the emotional – time-space compressed outbursts of anger, pain, rage, pleasure, desire, or the spiritual. (Law and Urry 2004: 403-404)

Accordingly, researchers need not be physically moving with methods, but most often they decisively – and quite frankly, pragmatically (although some would maybe deem that radically) – engage with methods in ways allowing the investigation of the dynamics of the corporeal, material, virtual, communicative and imaginary mobilities (Büscher and Urry, 2009). Hence methods can be regarded as always in-the-becoming as researchers attune into a networking ontology calling for sensitive attentions to the dynamics of distributed and contextual agency. Such approaches often draw upon tenets of especially multi-sited ethnography, but also intertwine more recent ICT-oriented approaches (GPS, mobile data, virtual data etc.) while also allowing for the contributions from e.g. sensory ethnographies and the performing arts. Consequently, as mobile methods are embedded in such interdisciplinary performances of research, acknowledging the ever fleeting nature of reality, methods are mixed in new strange fashions. Such (concurrently conflicting and highly compatible) interdisciplinarity might make disturbing repercussions in more static debates relating to conceptual characteristics of mobile methods.

The overwhelming spaces of tourism research In extension of the previous discussion, the final example proposes a less utilized way of pursuing embodiment in tourism research. The following exemplifies how engaging with tourism as a performance (see also Crang, 2002, 2003; Edensor, 2000) not only imply seeing tourists-as-performers, but asks of us to turn the performative notion inwards to interrogate the role of the researcher-body as it engages with the field. Similar to many of the previous examples, it does so by drawing on the prevalent ‘political turn’ in cultural geography dealing with embodiments and affects as ongoing relations that create societies and spaces (Anderson and Smith, 2010; Thrift, 1996, 2008; Lorimer, 2008; Pons, 2003). First and foremost, however, it extends mobilities-oriented research, by promoting an auto-ethnography sensitive to the too often overlooked phenomenological dimensions connected to the all-but-purposive, occasionally unintentional, even overwhelming, role of embodiment connected to the reflexive engagement with multi-sited fieldwork. Doing so it seeks to write itself into a stream of critical tourism research which seeks to nuance the divide between object and subject by analytically ‘folding them into each other’ (Cohen and Cohen, 2012, p. 2193). Let us, however, start by acknowledging that travel time is embodied time. To make an example, Laura Watts and Glenn Lyons studied train travel in Great Britain to find that the majority of travellers did not find their travel time to be a waste of time. Rather, their research pointed towards breaking down the traditional view on travellers as ‘economically-modeled passengers who are rational actors in a calculative transport system’ (Watts and Lyons, 2011, p. 104), but rather sensory engaged and embodied ‘wayfarers’. As such, they concluded that research should recognize that travelling is not only a matter of saving travel time (or connected to the upper discussion, purposively moving across Euclidian space), but to a high extent also a matter of making travel times/spaces. Such perspectives on train travel are surprisingly few (for another interesting take see also Watts, 2008), but for an example of their ability to re-address the extent of how travel time is embodied time see the critique made by Larsen (2001) – arguing that mobile tourist phenomena have been largely ignored in critical tourism studies. The following builds on top of this call, reflexively engaging with methods in such a manner as to attune into auto-embodiment and, especially, to showcase how researchers on-the-move sometimes are, and do become, overwhelmed. Such representations carry with them rich insights on the embodied, performed and sensory dimensions of auto-embodied fieldwork, yet generally too easily disregarded by researchers remaining ‘onlookers’ of tourist-based performances. Prior to the author’s participation in the introductory PhD course, a minor pilot-test had been carried out. It aimed at exploring the potentials of observation studies (and field note scrapples) as well as visual ethnography in the study of sociocultural and material dynamics onboard trains. However, what was naively thought to be a clearly defined pilot-test of certain methods in certain settings was inverted into an uneasy and highly ambiguous reflexive ethnography as a number of unprepared for interventions occurred. The following extract describes how the researcher was deprived of his intended methods; however, turning the rendition into a different representation of the engagement with (more or less) mobile methods.

Ethnographer ... train rider … tourist … bus passenger … Lübeck (Germany) … The train speaker announces that the train is unable to continue due to an acute emergency call … Sudden silence embraces the compartment … The speaker informs us that a bus will arrive soon to take us towards Oldenburg …

The announcement immediately triggers a myriad of reactions – eyes start to flagger and look in different directions. The eyes of travellers turn from apparent dwelling-like to more curious and concentrated; some showcase unsecure, nervous, movements; others appear rather unaffected, keeping their eyes stuck to the computer (movie) screen in front of them. Suddenly an obviously irritated train rider shares his situational connotations, as he breaks out: ‘This should be German efficiency, but we are moving as if we were driving with DSB [The National Danish Railway Company]!’ Collective laughter embeds the compartment as I manage to notice a group of four women picking up the remark, starting to discuss their personal experiences with DSB, before their conversation disappears into the murmur of the train compartment. I am enjoying this fruitful event as a researcher-on-the-move; quickly scripting down rough notes in my field book nervous of overlooking empirical insights of this effectful happening. The beauty of observation studies, I think to myself, at the time not noticing my hands moving in slightly more restless motions than minutes before the intervention, – a later look at the structure, coherence and level of detail of fieldwork note scrapples would evidently indicate that this was written by a researcher trying to capture too much – too fast ... The uncertainty of the moment is forcing us to prepare for movement. Alike many others, my jacket is spread across my legs. Unlike most others my brought-along dictaphone has also been tugged away by now. I manage to write a message home indicating that I will probably be late. Unknowingly (at least at that point!), I am transcending the divide between researcher and researched; I am corporeally and practically adjusting to the situation, becoming somewhat less of a conscious researcher than few minutes ago when my field book and pen physically (and physiologically) divided the train travellers and myself. The intervention has forced me to pack away my researcher-materiality (fieldwork equipment), to a certain extent demanded me into the researched [Unconsciously, my sweaty palms are already presenting a pre-cognitive trigger of the intervention, and makes up one very sensory presentation of the situational dynamics]. Next to that, a deep felt irritation of not being able to do my streamlined and oh-so structured pilot-test makes me curse the, by now, extended waiting time. A seemingly tired man inhales and exhales despairingly while opening a can of beer preparing for waiting time; Thirty minutes later train passengers are requested to leave the train to wait at the bus stop in front of Lübeck train station. All around mobile phones are put into use indicating the need to inform others. Other travellers use the chance to document the sudden ‘break’ of travel routines, an accidental chance to translate experiences into touristy group photos, awhile I notice an expressively frustrated bike rider immobilized by the sudden blockage of 2-300 train riders waiting for busses. The underlying restlessness and uncertainty appear to trigger myriads of performative reactions. Several train riders take pictures, behaving as an ephemeral guided tourist-group who happens to be stranded in Lübeck. I manage to catch a few photos as well, thinking that it might be well-worth eternalizing the incidence, and because the camera makes up a handy prerequisite for killing time – others appear to do so socializing, having mobile phone conversations, or listening to music in headphones.

[Insert figure 5.2 here] [Insert figure 5.3 here]

An hour or so later we enter the arriving bus. The train passengers are now spread across three different busses, no longer divided by seat numbers. The conductor switches to a reconfigured bus guide as he walks through the bus asking if people have any questions. The surreal experience peaks as he via the bus speakers announce that ‘Now, crossing the bridge, on your left hand side you can see our stranded train’. We – the self-entitled train riders – are reconfigured, and as a critical ethnographer I am negotiating with myself whether or not this makes up my intended aim of studying train travel – my research field has transcended its prejudiced locality, in Creswell, 2004) and, more concerning, my comfortably framed pilot test in between the train walls! Yet, here we sit, as strangers onboard a German bus – we are hybrids, mentally configured train riders (so our tickets tell us), nonetheless orchestrated to enjoy the ‘scenic views’ of Autobahn S1 from a bus window? Serious methodical headaches arrived at this point; ‘well, I have data enough to substantiate my points back home’, I think to myself, glazing out the bus window with the face of a disappointed researcher on the move …

In such account the potentials of mobile methods are defined through an embodied and phenomenological account of fieldwork experiences: A fieldwork that turned into a phenomenological oriented auto-ethnography of the act of doing fieldwork. Also, it offers an illustrative account of how a simple train travel (and a pilot test!) can be entangled in everydayness and extraordinary moments, not to mention mobility and immobility, as such extending the idea of de-exoticizing tourist travel and sociology on the move (Larsen, 2008). It does so by drawing upon the popularly phrased ‘third phase’ of ethnography (Sørensen et al., 2010) influenced by the postmodern turn through which ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 1973) and reflexive engagements with that which is researched are fundamental. Such engagement with mobile methods tunes down institutionalized criteria of reliability and validity in favour of underrated criteria of appearance and verisimilitude (Van Maanen, 1988) in its rendering of mobile experiences. In line with this, Spencer (2011, p. 44-45) favours a phenomenology which:

offers four qualities to help the reader evaluate the power and trustworthiness of phenomenological accounts: vividness, accuracy, richness and elegance. Is the research vivid in the sense that it generates a sense of reality and draws the reader in? Are readers able to recognize the phenomenon from their own experience or from imagining the situation vicariously? In terms of richness, can readers enter the account emotionally? Finally, has the phenomenon been described in a graceful, clear, poignant way?

Admittedly, the upper example merely strives towards such ideals, yet the argument remains that the skilled (mobile) researcher creates a ‘double transparency’ allowing simultaneously the description of ‘mobility in the making, while drawing the methods used in the production to their own and their audience’s attention’ (Büscher et al. 2011, p. 14). This might necessitate thinking of representation as rather (or better say, also) performative creations (Vannini, 2011). Recently, Xiao et al. (2013, p. 376) argued that many tourism researchers might find such non-representational concerns ‘obscure, opaque and unreachable in the current climate of scientisation, relevance and impact’. But then again, maybe such research climate is the exact reason for continuing trying to forward boundaries for tourism representations concerned with ‘the visceral experiences, atmospheres, vibes, emotions, and affective capacities that are currently mostly rendered inaccessible by the underlying philosophy of our current methodologies …’ (ibid). This final exposition injects a note of all-but-purposive phenomenology and sensory based wonder into the engagement with mobile methods. In order to do so it asks for researchers to let go of strictly predefined methodical approaches, to permit methods to be employed in interrelationship with those whom (or that which) we study. After all, it does not appear unreasonable to argue that train riders,

tourists, travellers and in this case, researchers-on-the-move, do become overwhelmed by mobility. Performances and embodiments also entail the all-but-purposive, undirected, and even indifferent dynamics. The final call has made an attempt to call for renewed sensitivity to such mobilities engagements. Conclusion The chapter started by asking; what are mobile methods? Ultimately it might prove more valuable to rearrange the question, rather asking How do we engage with methods, and how does this take part in producing the realities under scrutiny? Pursuing this latter question, the chapter has simplified the discussion by dealing with a number of tourism-related research trajectories engaging with mobile methods, one way or another, in order to illustrate the multiple manners in which mobility is given – more or less stable – essence. Accordingly, it is argued that (mobile) methods are always interwoven in research ideologies, conventions and practice-realities consequently shaping certain representations of that which is deemed mobile. None of them less important than others, but maybe some more utilized, routinized, distributed (and accepted?) in tourism research than others. And this is the point. Which mobile realities do we wish to make more real? Because interfere, we will, one way or another (Law and Urry, 2004). By showcasing this, the main point has been to describe the ambiguousness of mobile methods as connected to the variety of disciplinary hinterlands through which they enfold and become productive. Finally, the chapter argues that a potential direction for performative and embodied engagements with mobile methods can be found in the continuous development of studies intertwining a phenomenology sensitive to the overwhelming and less directed experiencing of mobility and sensory ethnographies (as here depicted through an auto- and visual ethnographic account). Maybe in the extension of such final arguments, the whispers of performativity made by Shusterman (1997, p. 129), might point towards the disciplinary bridge-building needed in order to develop such new engagements with, and (re)presentations of, tourism mobilities: ‘To understand the body as the ‘nondiscursive other’, we have to stop pushing words and start moving limps: stop talking and start dancing. Perhaps I should say no more’. References Ahas, R., Laineste, J., Aasa, A. and Mark, Ü., 2007. The Spatial Accuracy of Mobile Positioning: Some experiences with Geographical Studies in Estonia In: G. Gartner, W. Cartwright and M.P. Peterson (eds). Location Based Services and TeleCartography. Springer, pp. 445–60. Anderson, B. and Harrison, P., 2010. Taking-place: Non-representational theories and geography. Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Anderson, K. and Smith, S.J., 2001. Editorial: Emotional Geographies, Transactions of the Institute for British Geographers, New Series, 26(1), pp. 7–10. Andrews, H., 2005. Feeling at home: Embodying Britishness in a Spanish charter tourist resort, Tourist Studies, 5(3), pp. 247–66.

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Xiao, H., Jafari, J., Cloke, P., Tribe, J., 2013. Annals: 40-40 vision, Annals of Tourism Research, 40, pp. 352–85. Illustrations:

[Figure 5.1 Brainstorm session, Mobility and Mobile Methods PhD Course]

[Figure 5.2 Killing time in Lübeck]

[Figure 5.3 Researcher/Researched photographing]