Paper long abstract:

By taking the ethnographic case of young educated Polish tourists travelling to the former Soviet Union, I would like to address the question of how mobility of local dwellers is constructed in travel narratives. Are local dwellers presented as mobile or immobile? What types of local dwellers' mobility are exposed in tourists' accounts and what types are backgrounded? What are the economic, geographic and cultural patterns of local dwellers' mobilities in the accounts? Are local dwellers' mobilities evaluated and on what grounds (morality, aesthetics etc.)? Do tourists construct hierarchies of mobilities? Do they compare their own mobility to local dwellers' mobility? The aim of the paper is to unravel how (im)mobility (as practice and as metaphor) is involved in the construction of new concepts of Self and the Other. The tourists' accounts will be analyzed in the context of post-socialist transition and Europeanization.