Paper short abstract:

This paper explores in empirical detail how the videomaking practices of travel influencers contribute to the diversification of tourist encounters. The findings indicate that travel drones established new interdependencies among local tourism professionals, tourists, and platform audiences.

Paper long abstract:

Consumer drones can be increasingly spotted in tourist sites and arguably the aerial technology has transformed how the tourism destination Singapore is experienced and represented. This paper explores in empirical detail how the videomaking practices of travel influencers contribute to the diversification of tourist encounters. Based on evidence from ethnographic fieldwork in the Southeast Asian metropolis and on digital platforms, I seek to map tourist encounters which are facilitated by drone tourism. In recent years, drone videos featuring Singapore’s urban landscapes have rapidly gained popularity on YouTube. The participatory culture of the platform has also nurtured enduring knowledge transfers from drone experts to novices. Drawing on analyses of situated drone practices in Singapore’s Marina Bay and audiovisual representations of the urban area on digital platforms, this case study demonstrates how the researched travel influencers and their YouTube audiences assign meaning to tourist attractions. The frequent use of travel drones in Marina Bay gave rise to an additional space of representation for Singapore’s urban space. Drone footage shows urban aerial space from new, dynamic angles, complementing its representation in static satellite imagery displayed on GPS navigation apps. The findings indicate that travel drones established new interdependencies among local tourism professionals, tourists, and platform audiences. The representational power of local stakeholders, such as tour guides and tourist offices, over tourist places has been diminished by the rise of digital platforms in global tourism.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on rural-urban relations and absences in adapting with shrinkage as part of coexistences. Absences, uncertainty and related landscapes can be considered as creative tensions that generate particular presences at edges of urbanisation. Processes from Estonia´s town of Narva.

Paper long abstract:

Decrease of inhabitants, uncertainty and reconfiguring unused infrastructure are part of transformations in many large and small cities. The adaptation with various dynamics of shrinkage can take multiple forms and affective entanglements binding cities with non-urban entities. The paper focuses on expressed rural-urban relations and absences in adapting with shrinkage across different scales of coexistences. Absences and related landscapes can be considered as creative tensions that coproduce particular presences at edges of urbanisation (Vanolo 2019, Gandy 2022). These absent presences can draw together (and split apart) rural and urban along diverse qualities in context of transforming spatiality and temporality. Dynamics of shrinkage can become entangled with diverse dimension of uncertainty and crisis. The remaking of boundaries takes place through evolving associations rather than tangible lines of separation. These issues will be studied in the Estonia´s town Narva, which is situated next to the border between EU and Russia. I will focus on the role of urban fringes in Narva´s transformation. The research material combines artistic-architectural representations, stories of inhabitants and politics of spatial planning.

Paper short abstract:

Considering Scottish examples of street art from the past decade, including from the Scottish Independence Referendum, the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine, this paper will examine how street art can be a means of coping with uncertainty for creators, viewers, and, indeed, ethnographers.

Paper long abstract:

Street art, in its widest sense, is often the earliest publicly visible response to moments of uncertainty in everyday life. It uses and transforms existing spatial structures, highlighting society’s uncertainties, and often offering some kind of certainty in response. Though street art can be associated with the concept of resistance (Fransberg et al., 2021), in many cases the concept of ‘coping’ may be an equally apposite term to use. Indeed, some members of urban communities – not just street artists – may use street art, in its hybrid physical/digital forms, as a means of coping with isolation, anxiety, and the uncertainty brought about by near-daily changes to the status quo. Conversely, street art may contain ambiguity in its semiotic contents, adding to the uncertainty of urban spatial contexts. In this way, some passers-by may find solace in the very presence of street art, while others may become participants in the layering of meanings through its alteration and modification. After briefly defining the contested term street art for use within the disciplinary contexts of Ethnology and Folklore, this paper will consider the concepts of uncertainty, resistance, and coping, and through examples from across Scotland, examine creative street art responses to independence, COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, trans rights activism, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Paper short abstract:

With an ethnographic focus on domestic migrants from Northeast India, this paper explores the politics of ethno-spatial living in New Delhi and explains what factors motivate the creation of ethnic enclaves in the mega-city at a time of deepening political and economic uncertainties and anxieties.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past 20 years or so, heightened levels of migration have contributed to transforming New Delhi into a mega-city of gigantic proportions – and with multiple new infrastructural, economic, political and social problems arising from the co-habitation of tens of thousands of people coming to the capital from all over India. More recently, global economic and geopolitical uncertainties have added to the complex problems of Delhi residents and have exacerbated their daily anxieties and struggles. Within the mega-urban patchwork of communities, livelihoods and experiences, it has become evident that migrants from Northeast India (especially from the Naga and Mizo ethnic groups) have tended to cluster in particular locations in Delhi. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in one such location in South Delhi, this paper explores the factors which have contributed to the formation of such ethnic enclaves and the daily experiences, aspirations and challenges of their Naga and Mizo residents. What is interesting about these Northeast migrants is that more so than other migrant communities, which are also often subjected to various forms of discrimination and exclusion in New Delhi, Naga and Mizo migrants are, what I call, ‘hyper-visible’ migrants who experience multi-dimensional forms of everyday violence, discrimination and exclusion in New Delhi. The paper argues that in order to understand how the hyper-visibility of Naga and Mizo migrants influences their residential choices, we need to gain better insights into their everyday lived experiences amidst the ever-increasing uncertainty and precariousness of the urban mode of life in this mega-city.

Paper short abstract:

Based on the interviews conducted in Białowieza in Primeval Forest, next to the border with Belarus, it will be discussed how uncertainty influences the cultural memoryscape of Bialowieza, especially the content and perception of numerous signs of the tsar's family past role in the area.

Paper long abstract:

In my presentation, I will discuss how various macrostructural processes are causing insecurity in the village (in administrative terms) of Białowieza in Primeval Forest, next to the border with Belarus. Białowieza is a small-town arousing international interest as a settlement in the heart of a unique ecological asset and for the second year as a site of a border crisis. Basing on the in-depth interviews conducted within the local community during this winter the focus of my interest will be how uncertainty influences the cultural memoryscape of Bialowieża.

In the past Białowieza village was a site of royal hunting residences. At the end of the XIX century tsar Aleksander III funded there a luxurious palace estate. In the period of the People's Republic of Poland, Bialowieza, possessing post-imperial material features and a multi-ethnic community was an inconvenient legacy, and its cultural uniqueness was long neglected by the state. Since the late 70. the historic buildings of Bialowieza gradually have been placed under protection. Most of the monuments from the Russian imperial rule period have been restored or reconstructed. During the last decade, many images and narratives displaying the Romanovs family and their palace appeared in Bialowieza public spaces, and cultural diversity has begun to occupy a significant role in attracting tourists.

In my presentation, I will analyze how Russian invasion of Ukraine and the border crisis affected the perception of monuments and public narrations describing the tsar's family role in the area, and how present concerns and expectations influence them.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on posthuman and STS theories of care, this presentation argues that care practices aimed at healing and preserving the world are linked to how the world unfolds for individuals in their everyday life, as a web of actors to which they can feel (or not) affective and moral attachments.

Paper long abstract:

Lately, environmental problems have been a central element of attention for posthumanism and Science & Technology Studies (STS). Submersed on a relational and symmetrical ontology of the world, care emphasizes these interconnections and mutual dependence. Ideas such as "care networks" (Krzywoszynska, 2019), "support ecologies" (Duclos and Sánchez-Criado, 2019), and "ecologies of care" (Bowlby & McKie, 2018) enable a different grammar for thinking about ways to preserve the environment and respond to the ongoing climate crisis. Interrelated and interdependent networks are latent between individuals, technologies, microbes, plants, and the planet itself.

This presentation shows the results of research conducted in Chile that emphasized these interrelationships and interdependences based on individuals' ability to respond attentively to their surrounding worlds. Using care as a central concept, we highlight how these articulations are not a moral duty but a necessary vital condition for mutual survival (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, 2019). Thinking with the idea of "support ecologies", we reflect on how different objects and subjects are supported and cared for and how they influence their support conditions (Duclos & Sánchez-Criado, 2020). Different ways of understanding care emerge and diffract, leading to alternative practices (un)deployed under its name (Duclos & Sánchez-Criado, 2020). Furthermore, in urban spaces, individuals' capacity to care for the world seems entangled with their ability to sense, be moved and affected by different and uncertain ideas of what nature is and how it intertwines with everyday locations and infrastructures in the city and its surrounding.

Paper short abstract:

The research addresses how health interventions can be integrated in daily chores to different recipient groups. Specifically, it is analysed, discussed and case-study-tested, whether prevention measures may be easier to implement ‘to go’, firstly focusing the social-ecologic setting.

Paper long abstract:

The worldwide prevalence of obesity and overweight and their health effects remain a global epidemic; which threatens different cultural configurations, not only in the northern hemisphere, but also in the southern hemisphere. The consequences of nutrition related misbehavior are a leading risk factor for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes, coronary heart diseases, cancers or, chronic respiratory diseases, arthrosis, or organoleptic outcomes. NCDs are responsible for 71% of all deaths globally.

Double burden of malnutrition is specifically targeting cultural configurations with lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

Within public health, nutrition sovereignty is an overlooked feature. This involves food security - access to food - as well as nutrition security - access to a variety of foods. Nutrition sovereignty describes sovereignty to choose and take up, healthy nutrition. Especially the coordination and competencies to bring all aspects together, is often lacking. Hence, often the systemic failure in daily delivery is higher than the individual knowledge or access.

The present research addresses how a socio-ecological approach, which aims to ease health behavior in regard to the NCDs, using a simple daily shopping facility (health ‘kiosk’) in combination with existing information treatments.

Grounded in case-study report the research assesses the perception of socio-ecological interventions, which target population ‘to go’, during the daily chores in their socio-ecologic surrounding. The coordination problem will therefore be focused and rolled out to people of all life circumstances. The proliferation, usage and uptake of the information is further left to the individual; leaving a highest level of personal (health) sovereignty.