Jillian M. Rickly

Lifestyle Mobilities: A Politics of Lifestyle Rock Climbing

Abstract The conceptualization of ‘lifestyle mobilities’ has yet to fully account for the diversity within and across mobile communities in terms of leisure, travel, and identity. Lifestyle rock climbers, for example, maintain minimalist, hypermobile lifestyles in the full-time, non-professional pursuit of the sport. In an effort to interrogate lifestyle rock climbing within the broader conceptualization of lifestyle mobilities, this paper applies mesotheoretical ‘politics of mobility’ framework. It begins by tracing constellations of mobility and historical contexts within the rock climbing community more broadly. This is followed by an examination of the facets of a politics of mobility: motive force, speed, rhythm, route, experience, friction, turbulence, and remove, which together offer more nuanced understandings of the movement patterns and travel decisions of lifestyle climbing. However, to account for the community dynamics of lifestyle mobilities, there is a need to delve deeper and attend to the social relations that result from collective performances.

Contesting authentic practice and ethical authority in adventure tourism

ABSTRACT This paper examines the discourses of authenticity and ethics employed by adventure tourists regarding the use of the natural environment. In one case, full-time traveling rock climbers use their dedication to the sport and annual visits to the Red River Gorge as evidence for their authoritative voice on ethical climbing practice. While they identify the growing numbers of leisure climbers as a problem for sustainability, many also take up temporary employment as guides and are directly involved in the introduction of new climbers to the area. In another case, two groups of wilderness enthusiasts – “ADK 46ers” and “Summit Stewards” – lament the environmental and social impacts of other recreational users in the Adirondack Park. Despite being visitors themselves, Summit Stewards and 46ers use their sense of place and knowledge of Adirondack history and ecology to substantiate their authority as purveyors of ethical practice. In both cases, senses of responsibility are inspired by senses of place, but are articulated through notions of authenticity and used as justification for ethical authority. While validating their presence in these outdoor spaces, the use of such rhetoric also minimizes their own impacts yielding further tensions among user groups.

The (re)production of climbing space: bodies, gestures, texts

According to Lefebvre, space is not an absolute given, an empty and presumed starting point, but space is produced through human action. Furthermore, he contends, there is a material basis to the production of space – the ‘practical and fleshy body’. The body must be conceived as both active in the production of space and produced by space, and thereby subject to the determinants of that space. This article demonstrates the crucial role of the body in Lefebvre’s trialectic as it interrogates the embodied mobile practice of rock climbing, specifically sport climbing. First, it begins with an examination of the role of climbing bodies in the production of climbing space; put into practice by the perceived space of the rock, bodies shape and are shaped by this interaction. Second, it investigates the mechanisms that continue the production of climbing space off the rock face, as climbers communicate with practice-specific gestures and jargon. Third, it approaches climbing landscapes as texts, focusing on the production of representations of space as routes are inscribed on rock faces, transcribed into guidebooks and websites, and circulated among climbing media. Finally, considering landscape as a way of seeing forces the investigation to return, full-circle, to situate the ways bodies enact landscapes in relation to textual representations of space. As such, this article explores the relationality of individual climbing bodies, rock climbing communities, and climbing media in the (re)production of climbing space to demonstrate the complementarity of landscape–body and landscape-as-text perspectives in the social production of space.

Tourism geographies and the place of authenticity

Along with the earliest theories of tourism arose an interest in understanding the role of authenticity. These burgeoning efforts were based in history, anthropology, and sociology (see Boorstin, 1961; MacCannell, 1973, 1976; Cohen, 1979); yet, the subsequent infusion of geographical perspectives that spatialize authenticity have greatly enriched our conceptualizations. Indeed, these scholars were invaluable in laying the foundations of key aspects of authenticity – Boorstin (1961) in asserting tourism is comprised of pseudo-events drew attention to staged aspects of tourism encounters, MacCannell (1973; 1976) explicated the mechanisms through which staging occurs and initiated a discussion of the socio-cultural significance of authenticity, which Cohen (1979) then refined by elaborating on the various ways authenticity comes into play in tourists’ motivation for recreational, diversionary, experiential, experimental, and existential experiences. However, what these contributions were lacking was attention to the geographical, that tourism is simultaneously a mobilities and a placed-based phenomenon, and as such the roles of scale, mobilities, space, place, and landscape are crucial to experiences of authenticity.

Self-care for the researcher: dark tourism in Varanasi, India

ABSTRACT Dark tourism is a popular niche of tourism that allows tourists to come into close proximity with death, atrocity, and the macabre, and therefore has the potential to be an emotional and even traumatic encounter for tourists. While this context has inspired tourism researchers to investigate dark tourists’ motivations, as well as the marketing and representation of dark tourism sites, we have yet to attend to its implications for the researcher. This paper analyzes the emotional experiences and aftermath of fieldwork at the cremation grounds of Varanasi, India, which involved working closely with tourists, Doms, and Aghoris by focusing on the relations of reflexivity, positionality, and emotionality. As a result, we suggest a number of reflexive and self-care practices to be put into place so as to attend to the researchers’ emotional well-being in the fieldwork process.

Considering service animals in tourism

Accessible tourism is a rapidly growing sector of the tourism industry and increasingly recognized as essential to supporting mobility and leisure as human rights (Buhalis & Darcy, 2001; Buhalis, Darcy, & Ambrose, 2012; McCabe & Diekmann, 2015). This has contributed to active research regarding disabilities and mobilities needs in tourism (see Darcy & Dickenson, 2009; Small & Darcy, 2010), as well as the embodied experience of traveling with disabilities (see Small, Darcy, & Packer, 2012). Yet, the ways in which transportation services, accommodations, and tour operators provide for the needs of service animals remains underdeveloped (Pond, 1995; Bourland, 2009; European Commission, 2015) and, indeed, underexamined (see Small, Darcy, & Packer, 2012). Service animals are increasingly utilized to mitigate mobility challenges, particularly for those who live with visual impairment, physical disabilities, disorder response, or require emotional and psychological support. Nevertheless, we lack an understanding of the role of service animals in tourism mobilities and touristic experience (see also Small, Darcy, & Packer, 2012).

“I’m a Red River local”: Rock climbing mobilities and community hospitalities

With individuals continually on the move, mobility fosters constellations of places at which individuals collectively moor and perform community. By focusing on one climbing destination—the Red River Gorge—this article works across scales to highlight the spatial politics of mobilizing hospitality. In so doing, it summarizes the ways hosting/guesting thresholds dissolve with the growth of particular rock climbing–associated infrastructures and moves to examine the ways climbers’ performances of community result in the (semi-)privatization of public space and attempts at localization. Furthermore, this article highlights the ways mobility is employed to maintain a political voice from afar, as well as to forge “local” identities with The Red as place with distinct subcultural (in)hospitality practices. Hospitality practices affirm power relations, and they communicate who is at “home” and who has the power in a particular space to extend hospitality. The decision to extend hospitality is not simply the difference between an ethical encounter and a conditional one; it takes place in the very performance of identity. Thus, integrating a mobilities perspective into hospitality studies further illuminates the spatial politics that are at play in an ethics of hospitality.

“They all have a different vibe”: a rhythmanalysis of climbing mobilities and the Red River Gorge as place

This article integrates a mobilities perspective and Lefebvre’s notion of rhythmanalysis as a means to interrogate place as an entanglement of mobilities, moorings, and rhythms. By investigating one popular rock climbing destination, this article demonstrates that mobilities invite encounters with and enactments of place such that travel rhythms, everyday rhythms, and natural rhythms coalesce, interrupt, and even emerge anew. Focusing on lifestyle rock climbers (a particular type of lifestyle mobility dedicated to the pursuit of climbing) and climbing events provides evidence for the ways informational and physical mobilities contribute to and even regiment rock climbing travel rhythms, while the everyday rhythms of place illustrate embodiment as crucial to the enfolding of rhythm and mobilities. Building from Lefebvre’s theory of rhythm and Edensor and Holloway’s re-articulation of its potential for mobilities studies, this article emphasizes the ongoing relationality of embodied mobilities and bodily rhythms, seasonal rhythms and informational mobilities, collective mobilities and institutional rhythms.

Choreographies of landscape: signs of performance in Yosemite National Park

a Christmas journey home from a bonded position in New South Wales, who gets stranded in the hard-drinking mining town, with devastating consequences. GIS mappings of the novelistic, cinematic and playtext framings of ‘locationalism’ evoked by distinct readings of Wake in Fright offer the various perspectives of the imaginative geographies of place conjured west from urban Sydney from several dusty Outback towns by the view-point of a ‘city feller’. GIS provides the means to perceive how a triptych of mediums remediates their ‘senses of place’ from contrasting locational, textual, ocular and performative aspects. In doing so, the chapter illuminates historian David Staley’s argument for employing ‘ergodic’ GIS methods to map and write visual and spatial histories (Staley & Travis, 2012). Chapter Two explores the cultural topography of the Deep North as anchor for the geographic imagination and mythic space of Australian national identity. Chapter Three provides a geovisualized, longitudinal study of convict (and erstwhile cannibal) Alexander Peace and his multiple escapes (with fellow ‘lunch-mates’) from a penal colony into the fetid tropical jungle of the Tasmanian wilderness. In Chapter Four, the short film Red Dog acts as a visual travel narrative to plot mobilities across the iron ore mining region of Pilbara in Western Australia. Chapter Five presents the Central Australian desert as a Terrae Incognitae to discuss the challenges in undertaking narrative mappings of deeply ambiguous and ambivalence landscapes and places. In conclusion, the spatial humanities are deftly engaged across a spectrum of literary, cinematic, and media studies in approaches that flesh out the possibilities for enhancing contemporary geographical perceptions of place. As a primer on socio-cultural contextualization methods for emerging ‘Deep Mapping’ practices, this extraordinary work navigates through a variety of heuristic scales and scopes: platial, temporal, discursive, visual, oral, sociocultural, and performative in its unearthing of the great myth that is Australia.ORCID Charles Travis

Tourism, aesthetics, and touristic judgment

This article explores the role of aesthetics in the tourist experience. Because tourism involves the interpretation of signs within a landscape and landscape imagery is an important way in which places are delineated, aesthetic modes—the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque—are important foundations for the making of meaning when touring. However, aesthetics does more than bring order and meaning to what we see while touring by providing paradigms of visuality. These same paradigms also serve to naturalize ideology through the subjective judgments involved in tourism, a process we term “touristic judgment.”