Community and mobility

Research projects

Mobilities on the Margins: Creative Processes of Place Making

Supervision

Gunnar Þór Jóhannesson og Katrín Anna Lund

Research portal - Gunnar Þór Jóhannesson

Research portal- Katrín Anna Lund

Other participants

Elva Björg Einarsdóttir, Doctoral graduate student
Þórný Barðadóttir, Doctoral graduate student
Björn Þorsteinsson, IUniversity of Iceland
Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir, Iceland University of the arts
Outi Rantala, University of Lapland
Jo Vergunst, University of Aberdeen
Carina Ren, Aalborg University

About the project

This interdisciplinary project, spanning the social sciences and humanities, examines how rural places perceived at the margins come into being through interference of everyday mobilities and creative practices. A special concern is to explore the links between tourism, landscape and material culture. With a focus on two places in Iceland, the south- west corner of the Westfjords and Melrakkaslétta peninsula, the project pays attention to ‘undressed’ or undesigned spaces that are identified as spaces of potentiality. The project puts emphasis on the more-than-human approach that rejects conventional dichotomies that separate culture from nature. The overall question asks how investigating everyday mobilities, creative practices and more-than-human everyday entanglements may provide an alternative insight and bolster innovative activities for place development. In order to do so the project adopts methods apt to bring forth how the human and the more-than-human entangle in place making. The project is organized in three work packages one which is conceptual scrutinising the key concepts underlying the project. The other two use ethnographic methods to study and work with mobility, creative practices and place making in the two case study areas. The project will have both scientific and societal impact. It will develop conceptual tools to grasp and further rural development in marginal areas as it provides alternative vision that goes beyond conventional practices.