Marie Mikkelsen

Vacability and Sociability as Touristic Attraction

Researchers sometimes portray the tourist as someone who travels the world searching for authentic experiences and scorns both ‘being a tourist’ and other tourists. However, in drawing on two studies of seemingly mundane kinds of holidays, this article points to two under-researched dimensions. The first dimension is ‘sociability’ and relates to the skill or tendency of being social during the holidays. This dimension covers tourists’ searches for meaningful social interactions with other tourists and how some tourists, instead of scorning other tourists, actively and deliberately go on holiday in order to ‘be’ with other tourists. The second dimension is labelled ‘vacability’ and is defined as the quest to truly ‘vacare’ and to the tourists’ ability to be vacant. This dimension relates to some tourists’ wish to be ‘freed from experiences’ during the holidays and how the choice of a seemingly mundane type of holiday may prove superior in making the tourist able to indulge in vacability.

Freedom in mundane mobilities: caravanning in Denmark

Freedom is a widely discussed and highly elusive concept, and has long been represented in exoticised, masculinised and individualised discourses. Freedom is often exemplified through the image of a solitary male explorer leaving the female space of home and familiarity and going to remote places of the world. Through in-situ interviews with families caravanning in Denmark, the primary aim of this study is to challenge existing dominant discourses surrounding the subject of freedom within leisure and tourism studies. Second, we shed further light on an under-researched medium of mobility, that of domestic caravanning. This serves to not only disrupt representations of freedom as occurring through exoticised, masculinised and individualised practices, but to give attention to the domestic, banal contexts where the everyday and tourism intersect, which are often overlooked. This novel repositioning opens up new avenues in tourism studies for critical research into the geographies of freedom in mundane, everyday contexts.

‘We have not seen the kids for hours’: the case of family holidays and free-range children

The purpose of this paper is to explore what ‘children having a good time’ means in the context of a mundane type of holidaying, namely caravanning. Focusing on families, this paper draws on 210 qualitative in situ interviews with 437 people spending the holidays at 5 different Danish caravan sites.The study points to ‘family time’ and childrens ‘own time’ as interdependent entities that allow for the balancing of social identities (pursued through family time) and more individual interests (pursued through own time). Compared to extant theory, caravanning seems to allow for more ‘own time’ and ‘spouse time’ for adults, because children have extraordinary opportunities to engage in ‘own time’. Furthermore, the study suggests that ‘real, quality family time’ is best achieved insofar one ‘has not seen the kids for hours’ in between the precious moments of thick sociality and family togetherness that involve all family members.