Maja Lagerqvist

I would much rather be still here and travel in time : the intertwinedness of mobility and stillness in cottage living

Along with urbanisation and modernisation, the use of second homes has increased in the Western world. This can be seen as part of the increasing mobility of people in society, but also as part of a search for stillness and escape from modern urban society. Recently, scholars in geography and other disciplines have argued that mobility and fixity are two sides of the same coin. This paper aims to explore the complex, manifold and often paradoxical relationship between mobility and immobility in practices of dwelling and seeking stillness in a highly mobile society. It elaborates on how mobility and stillness, in both space and time, are intertwined and mutually influence each other by analysing second home usage of old cottages that formally were dwelling houses of poor tenant smallholdings in Sweden. How do mobility and stillness exist and interact at these cottages and what parts do the cottages themselves have in this? This is studied through interviews with cottage users on their daily life practices and encounters with history and materiality at the cottages. These cottages are easily thought of as places of immobility where time has stood still. However, the paper shows that these cottages are places that continuously emerge through entanglements of mobility and stillness and of present and past times. The practices and experiences of mobility and stillness at the cottage are much integrated in and directed by the cottages’ specific geography, history and materiality, and the activities and thinking of their users because of these characteristics. The users go to the cottage to be at a place where they, with the help of the preserved materiality and history of the cottages, can feel rooted and still. At the same time the cottages offer imaginary time travels and experiences of other times and lifestyles.

Reverberations of a Crisis: The Practical and Ideological Reworkings of Irish State Heritage Work in Economic Crisis and Austerity

In 2008 the Republic of Ireland entered an economic crisis as part of the global economic crisis. It was met with austerity measures, and Ireland has since experienced large cuts in state spending on health, education, and heritage. Across Europe, the effects of the crisis on heritage have mostly been highlighted in general or supposed terms rather than empirically analyzed. Based on interviews with state and non-state actors in the heritage sector, this paper investigates the effects of the economic crisis and austerity within Irish official heritage management. The crisis has brought changes to the ways heritage is conceptualised and dealt with from a state perspective. These changes are important to track because one key part of the continuous process of production of heritage and its values in society is the ways state heritage management frames and works with heritage. The analysis focuses on four implications: budget cuts; how the crisis creates uncertainty, pauses, and short-termism; an increasing instrumentalization of heritage; and an increasing involvement and dependency on non-state actors. Economical logics, expertise, legal liabilities, short-term emergency responses, and skills in making persuasive arguments grow in importance, while long-term strategies and projects that may not lead to measurable revenues in terms of tourism or employment get put aside. The study opens up critical questions of (in)equality and changing influences within heritage management, of what and who is, should, and can be included in and supported by state heritage management, and by which logic.

The pan flute musicians at Sergels torg: between global flows and specificities of place

Research on the relationship between music and place has highlighted the importance of music — in terms of both consumption and production — for how people experience, feel and perceive places as well as how they act in those places (e.g. Johansson and Bell, 2009). Connell and Gibson (2003: 192) state that ‘Music, through its actual sound, and through its ability to represent and inform the nature of space and place, is crucial to the ways in which humans occupy and engage with the material world.’ Simultaneously, scholars contributing to the so-called ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences since the 1990s have argued for the understanding of social and cultural life as inherently mobile. However, the relationship between music and mobility has remained underexplored in both literatures on sound/music and the wide-ranging literatures on the experiential dimensions of mobilities. In this chapter we address this gap by exploring how live musical performances in an urban public space come to matter in a number of ways for local mobilities (both physical and imaginary), and the tensions that arise between global flows and local place-making. Given the theme of this anthology, we also aim for this chapter to contribute to a wider theorisation of the relationship between representational and non-representational dimensions of urban place-making, through a lens of musical mobilities.