Tarja SalmelaUiT The Arctic University of Norway · Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education
Tarja Salmela
Doctor of Social Sciences
Working with my research project Vanlife Landscapes.
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About
31
Publications
4,905
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246
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
For the last years I've been working towards re-conceptualization of central concepts and practices of tourism and travel. My current project approaches self drive and route tourism through lifestyle mobilities. Working with communities and tourism actors along infamous driving routes in Northern Highlands, Scotland, and Helgeland, Norway, and the international vanlife community, the project dives deep to the complexities of route tourism, and fosters decolonizing storytelling of route tourism.
Publications
Publications (31)
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...
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...
Projects
Projects (5)
Vanlife landscapes (2022-) is my postdoctoral research project at the
UiT – Arctic University of Norway. https://vanlifelandscapes.weebly.com/
In the project, I aim to craft alternative stories of vanlife and the road trip culture through decolonizing, more-than-human storytelling practices. These practices are sensitive to the forgotten, silenced or disregarded histories of the landscapes driven through, evoking alternative conceptualizations and lived experiences of life on the road.
My work situates in Sápmi (Finnmark and Helgeland)
and the Northern Highlands, Scotland.
The project is conducted as part of a larger project at UiT:
Traveling Post-Corona: Revisiting Guests and Hosts (2021-2025) (https://uit.no/project/reiselivet-post-corona)
Our ongoing research project, Envisioning Proximity Tourism with New Materialism, is funded by Academy of Finland between a time period of 1.9.2019-31.8.2023. In the project, we explore possibilities of proximity Tourism in the Arctic settings; a valuable alternative for global mass tourism that emphasizes local destinations, short distances and lower-carbon transport modes travel.
Our empirical work focuses on visiting forests in Finnish Lapland, especially Pyhä-Luosto national park. More specifically, we develop a methodological approach called participatory more-than-human ethnography that enables knowing with and learning from non-human-nature.
The project has potential to produce significant societal effects by advocating proximity tourism as an ecologically sound form of tourism. It provides a novel narrative that is based on mutual care between humans and other earthly creatures.
For tourism businesses, entrepreneurs, and policy-makers working in tourist organizations and regional councils, the project offers conceptual tools and practical examples of proximity tourism. This helps them to recognize the value of proximity tourism and to design innovative local products.
www.ilarctic.com
This is my dissertation project which started in 2013 and is now in pre-examination phase. It investigates the (dis)organized sleeping body in practices of organizing and wider in the western society by introducing sleep and dreaming as holding disruptive force, allowing a wider perspective of human subjectivity in organizations. This project unfolds my enthusiasm as an organizational scholar to engage with psychoanalytic theories and combine them with previous socio-cultural research on sleep and critical organization studies.
