AbstractNature is the principal attraction cited by tourists for visiting Iceland. The diverse natural attractions in various locations across the country make mobility essential for tourism. With driving being the main mode of transport, roads become central to visitors’ experience in the growing tourism sector. This chapter argues that the road has an often overlooked role in creating an understanding of the environment. The chapter sets out by looking at roads along the key trajectory of tourism along the Golden Circle leading to the waterfall of Gullfoss and the Geysir area, by investigating roadbuilding of the past and present in the national park of Þingvellir and how roads are represented through time. Road networks are a pragmatic infrastructure for creating connections but also become meaningful for how we understand the landscape around us. With the tourism sector largely emphasising individual attractions or destinations as part of the tourist experience, this chapter shifts focus onto routes, roads and landscapes, highlighting how roads become fundamental in constructing relations to nature through the transformation of the landscape and by enabling mobilities.

AbstractThe objective of the chapter is to trace how places are created through mobilities and tourism performances. The discussion is based on relational ontology, framing tourism as an ordering that enacts realities rather than a neatly defined industry or a sector. Hence, instead of thinking about tourism as a practice that happens within a pre-defined space it is illustrated how tourism encounters produce space. The chapter sets out from two encounters between tourists and a ship grounded at the shoreline at the shoreline of Skápadalur in Patreksfjörður, in the southern part of the Westfjords region in Iceland. The wreckage of a ship called Garðar has become an object of interest for the growing number of tourists visiting the region. The chapter traces some of the mobilities through which Garðar has contributed to the making of place, most recently through its entanglement with tourism mobilities. The story of Garðar exemplifies how places emerge through different kinds of mobilities and encounters in time and space and how tourism mobilities contribute to place making through a wide array of objects and performances.

AbstractThe chapter addresses how places are temporal and multilayered. They are obvious and hidden at the same time and always becoming through relational encounters of more-than-humans. In the chapter, the author makes use of two different methods, walking and map analysis, to explore how Western Barðastrandarsýsla county, a marginal place in southern part of the Westfjord peninsula, Iceland, can be and has been defined. Walking is an embodied experience, it relates to all the senses through the lived experience of the body as it moves with the environment. As a research method, walking reveals or produces a sense of understanding of the environment and emergent landscapes. Maps and place name archives produce another kind of knowledge about the landscape, gained and recorded through the ages. By analysing maps and crossing them with embodied experience of walking the old routes of Western Barðastrandarsýsla county, new knowledge can be created that provides understanding of the past and becoming of a place.

AbstractThis chapter follows the journey of a doctoral research project from the setting of a research agenda, a theoretical framework and a methodological approach to conducting research on site. The research sets focus on Melrakkaslétta, a rural area on the Icelandic northeast coast. Melrakkaslétta is situated far north of the beaten Icelandic tourism track and has as such mostly been bypassed by the recent global tourism boom. This, however, does not mean that Melrakkaslétta is an immobile place as it has for centuries been inhabited and visited by humans and other beings.The research design is set within a qualitative research paradigm, where through flat ontology and a post-ANT lens, ethnographic methodology is applied with the aim of co-creating knowledge with the humans and the more-than-human world of Melrakkaslétta. The chapter explores the decisions and reasoning for the research, where the aim is to inspect tourism in a non-touristy, rural area, with the agenda of avoiding perceiving the margin either as a rural idyll or a site of rural hardship, decline and struggle. Instead, at the core is the assumption that in Melrakkaslétta, as elsewhere in the world, joy and well-being occur amongst the various challenges of any existence.

AbstractThis book examines places on the margins and the dynamics through which a marginal position of a place is created. Specifically, it explores how places, mostly in sparsely populated areas, often perceived as immobile and frozen in time, come into being and develop through interference of everyday mobilitiesand creative practices that cut across the spheres of culture and nature as usually defined.

AbstractThis chapter takes the reader on a journey into the wilderness of Melrakkaslétta and follows the researcher who takes on the role of an explorer to rethink the potentiality of a place as a tourist destination. Selected encounters with features and figures whilst journeying are examined. What these have in common, although different in nature, is that they bring the flow of movement to a momentary, sometimes poetical, standstill which requires rethinking the order of things in an explorative manner. The features selected are: Beach Arctic terns Moss and lichens Modern ruin The aim is to examine how one can be in touch with the surroundings by allowing for the narratives they entail to emerge when moving with them. A beach reveals how heterogeneous materialities are moved about by natural forces which reflects on the constant rejuvenation that a place undergoes. Arctic terns provide a sense for constant renewal through seasonal changes and extreme mobile abilities. Moss and lichens bring one into direct touch with multispecies habitation that grows and nurtures, whilst modern ruins of a derelict farm give an insight into more-than-human co-habitation of flows and fluxes. These features represent mobile forces that constantly shape a place; a destination.

AbstractHow can we move towards a tourism that focuses on the inner landscape of the guest and the host; on how they are moved from the inside or touched by the tourism experience? What is being moved? Who is being moved? How can both guest and host be moved by the relations created in their encounter? To explore these questions I guide the reader through my own personal journey of being moved by the landscape of Melrakkaslétta, a journey that moved me to think about alternative approaches to tourism where the inner landscapes of guests and hosts are central. The aim of this journey is to highlight how landscapes are not only visual outer phenomena that we look at from a distance but rather whole entanglements of materials, beings, senses and processes that are constantly moving with and being moved by each other.

AbstractHow should we make sense of our current situation, global and local? What could such a making of sense imply? What, indeed, should we make of the notion of sense in this regard? In this chapter, in the company of Merleau-Ponty, Barad, Ingold and others, the modalities of sense are explored and deployed in interrelation with lived experiences of mobilities at the margins—of nature and culture. More specifically, such ruminations are developed from out of interactions with more-than-human actors such as seabirds nesting on offshore rocks and with concrete, decaying silos at the heart of a small fishing village in North-East Iceland. In the process, a sense will be developed of what such encounters can tell us—human sensitive, active and acted-upon beings—about the way in which we have to make sense of what we face. The ultimate aim is to think beyond tourism towards a wide-ranging notion of the coming-and-going of beings, through a situated, embodied common sense, that makes sense in the current global crisis.

AbstractIn this chapter, we consider the process of walking with landscape, underlining the importance of recognising more-than-human intimacy in proximity tourism. We set out with a small group from Reykjavík, Iceland that headed off on a tour in the north-western countryside to walk together with nature and each other. We seek to examine how, whilst walking, the surroundings themselves demand to be acknowledged as vital agents and direct participants of the walk, and we examine how the group needed to tune into the rhythms of the landscape, considering its flora, fauna, and earthly qualities, as well as the narratives that emerged as the walk continued, sometimes surprising and even confronting but constantly shifting the rhythms of the walk and shaping its atmospheres. By doing so, we demonstrate how different terrains evoke different proximities, sensations, and thoughts alongside a number of spatial and temporal connections that affect the rhythms of the body in the landscape with its outermost feelings and sensations.

AbstractIn this contribution, we explore how proximity may be cultivated as a way to re-experience and retell tourism and how research might become more sensitive to modest and mundane tourism practices. By doing so, we wish to interfere with common binaries in the tourism studies literature, such as home and away and ordinary and extraordinary. Based on our personal experiences from places close to our hearts, we ask: How may we cultivate proximity as part of our research methodology to enact-through-knowing and care for (alternative) tourism? How may we cultivate collaborative ways of knowing tourism while at a distance? We invite you to two places close to our hearts, places that are—at first glance—mundane and unexceptional, to experiment with alternative methodologies. We make use of postcards from these places as probes to revisit the tourist gaze and the tourist experience, enacting these familiar places through alternative means. The postcard narratives exemplify how proximity can help us cultivate modest and situated tourism research practices and enact places and landscapes as tourism sites in proximate and sensitive ways.