1st Edition
Mobility and Place Enacting Northern European Peripheries
The Northern peripheries of Europe, which are covered by this book, are associated with remoteness, the frontier, isolated communities, colonialism and resource extraction. Recently, huge projects in petroleum and hydropower have been located there, and the region has become better known as an attractive tourist destination. Although these spaces are perceived as being marginal, they are inhabited and linked into globalization and international agendas. This book examines how people live in such remote spaces in an emerging global world of connectivity, interdependency, mobility and non-linear dynamics. The various case studies examine a wide range of experiences, ranging from tourists and local settlers to those who migrate for labour in old or new industries, or to pursue the hybrid urban/rural life of the periphery. In this book, mobility and place come together. The analyses demonstrate how mobility and place mutually constitute each other and how specific relationships between the two aspects are crucial in the making of societies. The authors study attempts to reinvent places, together with connections and the opening of 'new scapes' in order to sustain businesses, municipalities and people's livelihood.
Biography
Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt is Associate Professor in Geography, Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change (ENSPAC), Roskilde University, Denmark. Brynhild Granås is a PhD student at CEPIN Research School, Department of Sociology, University of Tromsø, Norway.
'This interdisciplinary and international collection of essays brings together astute theoretical practice and detailed empirical investigation to shed light on the entanglement of place and mobility in the marginalized spaces of Northern Europe. In its refusal to privilege either the located or the mobile it is exemplary and should be read by all those interested in the geographies of place and mobility.' Tim Cresswell, University of London, UK 'This exciting collection of articles on mobility and place is topical in many senses. It shows at first, in the spirit of the emerging mobility paradigm, how these categories can be brought together and approached from various theoretical angles and concrete perspectives. Secondly, the book displays how social and cultural context makes a difference but also how these contexts are nowadays increasingly related to other contexts, processes and ideologies. While most articles in the book look at what might be labelled as Northern European peripheries, many contributions exceed dichotomies such as global-local, culture-nature or human-non-human. Leaning on approaches developed in human geography, sociology and anthropology, the book usefully takes steps towards interdisciplinary mobility studies.' Anssi Paasi, University of Oulu, Finland '...a welcome addition not only to social science scholarship on the geographical peripheries of northern Europe, but also to global scholarship on place, mobility, migration, and globalization.' Island Studies Journal '...an excellent contribution to the discussion in social sciences on how to capture ambiguities, tensions and processes in social reality. I will highly recommend it to academics and students at all levels in social science.' Geografiska Annaler 'The volume makes a useful contribution to the growing literature on mobility and place...a valuable read for social and cultural geographers and others interested in the complex relations between place and mobility.' European Spati
