Tarja Salmela

• Doctor of Social Sciences
• Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UiT The Arctic University of Norway

This entry introduces ‘curiography’ as an innovative, post-qualitative epistemological framework that disrupts anthropocentrism in the academic inquiry of management and organization research. Curiography helps us to become attentive to earthly relationships through curiosity, which is inherent in human nature but often overlooked in the developmen...

This essay is an experiment of knowledge production - a dialogue among three women that connected through wool and the practice of writing letters. Visit https://metode.r-o-m.no/artikler/essay/weaving-knowledge-writing-letters-with-wool for full reading experience.

Backpacking is transforming as we speak. Some of the existing definitions of backpacking are changing, as are some persistent stereotypes of the phenomenon, letting go of their grip in a world where technological innovations, the knock-on effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the fragile global political situation are manifesting in new, sometimes...

Why do we ask questions? How to learn to listen? And what is polite curiosity? These and many other questions will be addressed in this episode, where we will be passengers in a journey to curiography. Professor Anu Valtonen and postdoctoral researcher Tarja Salmela are the guides for this episode. https://antroblogi.fi/radio-antro/radio-antro-ant...

Blog post at Vanlife Landscapes project blog. Available at: https://vanlifelandscapes.weebly.com/blog/humanitys-memory (direct link at the comments)

Recognizing that humans inhabit Earth with multiple others and that humans have worsened opportunities for life on Earth calls for a reassessment of the research practices through which the world is explored. The development of more-than-human methodologies is underway, as reflected in the emergence of more-than-human or multispecies ethnographies....

This paper explores vulnerable relational knowing, and in it we open up our own embodied habits and experiences as feminist academics. We discuss how displaying our academic bodies as naked, both symbolically and physically, enhances and appreciates—instead of hiding—vulnerability. We also discuss how our academic bodies entangle with a range of mo...

This literature review aims to build an understanding of the scope and amount of research published on the topic of proximity tourism within the tourism and hospitality literature. In addition to referring to a particular form of tourism that emphasises local destinations, short distances and lower-carbon modes of transportation, proximity tourism...

CSCC:n järjestämän "Pyhiinvaelluksen paikat" -seminaarin (23.4.2021) puhujat Tuomas Hovi (Siirtolaisinstituutti), Kimi Kärki (Turun yliopisto) ja Tarja Salmela (Lapin yliopisto) Juuso Airolan (CSCC) haastateltavina. Aiheina mm. mahdollinen pyhän kokemus luonnossa ja popkulttuurin tähtien haudoilla. Organized by the conference Places of Pilgrimage,...

Invited speech in seminar "Places of Pilgrimage". Seminar description: Lähes kaikilla suurilla uskonnoilla on yksi tai useampia pyhiinvaelluskohteita. Kristinuskon piirissä pyhiinvaellukset suuntautuivat aluksi Jeesuksen elämän merkittäville paikoille sekä marttyyrien ja apostolien haudoille. Ajan mittaan katolisen kirkon piirissä suosioon nousiva...

Western lifestyle, rooted in growth-oriented capitalism mindset, often disregards finiteness and death – the cornerstones of all life. The lure of eternal growth’s illusion is present in the acts of profit maximization and force-fed rapidity in the business world, whilst our everyday lives are characterized by a pervasive need to gain more and more...

For more than two decades, Arctic destinations have experienced ever-growing tourism figures and an increasing global interest in the North and its attractions. This has contributed to the establishment of alternate livelihoods and new hope, at least in those places and regions that have recently suffered from de-industrialization and out-migration...

Medical images taken with mobile phones by patients, i.e. medical selfies, allow screening, monitoring and diagnosis of skin lesions. While mobile teledermatology can provide good diagnostic accuracy for skin tumours, there is little research about emotional and physical aspects when taking medical selfies of body parts. We conducted a survey with...

The current Earthly crisis demands new imaginings, conceptualisations and practices of tourism. This paper develops a post-anthropocentric approach to envisioning the possibilities of the ‘proximate’ in tourism settings. The existing generic definitions of proximity tourism refer to a form of tourism that emphasises local destinations, short distan...

This paper joins the debate on multispecies encounters in tourism by focusing on a hitherto overlooked animal: the mosquito. Drawing from feminist new materialist literature, it works towards a post-anthropocentric approach to exploring the narratives performed around the mosquito–tourist encounter and to casting a transformative narrative – living...

This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together....

”Ehdotus ihmistä suhteellistavaksi sanastoksi” käsittelee ja esittelee teoriasuuntausta, joka tunnetaan ”posthumanistisena”, keskittyen erityisesti sen käsitteisiin ja termeihin. Posthumanistinen ajattelu pyrkii käsitteelliseen uudistamiseen, jotta tunnistaisimme paremmin ne suhteellisuudet, joiden varassa ja lomassa ihmisten elämä ja merkitykset m...

Although there is a growing body of literature focusing on the use of qualitative research approaches for understanding human-animal relations, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the topic in tourism studies. In particular, the central role played by animals in the tourism industry and thus in the creation of tourism experiences call...

In this paper, we investigate the use of mobile technology in an underexplored context, the bed that couples share. Despite large amounts of research on the impact of pre-bedtime technology use on our sleep and mental state, scant research in the HCI field focuses on the physical bed as a negotiated site of technology use by couples. This paper exp...

A Book Review of Elsphet Probyn's (2016) Eating the Ocean, by Durham and London: Duke University Press.

New digital devices monitoring the body are increasingly used as research devices. As highly intimate new media objects, placed next to our skin, they challenge our notions of privacy and contribute to the generation of affects—disrupting considerations of “successful” research. In this article, we offer an auto-ethnographic study of (not) using a...

This dissertation tells a junior researcher’s story when engaging with an affective and intimate auto-ethnography that investigates the (dis)organized sleeping body in practices of organizing. Evolving into a multi-disciplinary research process, the dissertation draws from organization studies, tourism studies, psychoanalysis and socio-cultural st...

This paper joins the debate on the ambiguous, complex, and shadowy realities of organizational life. It suggests that the psychoanalytical concept of uncanny provides an apt lens for making sense of the uncolonized terrains within organizations that escape rationalization, but that still give rise to organizational subjectivity. We propose that sle...

What is sharing economy? What is the potential of transportation services in sharing economy? Starting with examples of ride sharing, bike sharing, mobility as service platforms and continuing to deliberate on the possibilities and challenges of sharing economy in Finnish Lapland. This presentation is part of Shareable tourism project (EAKR) by Uni...

This article enriches practice-based studies on bodily knowing by conceptualizing the knowing body as a floating body. This concept accords epistemic value to two forms of bodily existence – waking and sleeping – that are considered to be intertwined and floating. Based on an auto-ethnographic study conducted in Finnish academia, we propose three d...

This article is an uncanny journey to the Bubble. It provides an autoethnographic exploration of a novel form of tourism—glamping—and takes the reader into an adventure to a see-through plastic Bubble located in a nature park in France. Moreover, it unfolds a specific form of glamping, namely sleep-centric glamping, as part of a wider sleep tourism...

Ihminen nukkuu kolmanneksen elämästään. Viime vuosina nukkuminen on tullut uudella tavalla taloudellisen, yhteiskunnallisen ja poliittisen keskustelun piiriin. Silti nukkuva ruumis on pitkään ohitettu johtamis- ja organisaatiotutkimuksessa. Tämä tutkimus paikkaa tätä aukkoa nostamalla nukkuvan ruumiin tarkastelun keskiöön, osallistuen ruumiillisest...