Cruise ships and post-industrial port cities' dynamics : an experimental sensory ethnographic approach to contemporary social, spatial and material interactions

Abstract

This thesis proposes an experimental sensory ethnographic approach to investigate the phenomenon of cruise ship tourism, from an ashore perspective, with cruise terminals and their surroundings as key nodes to my research. My focus is on how these aquamobilities – as I designate them - are performed in, interact with, and co-produce, the places visited. The main aim of this thesis is to contribute with liveliness (Back, 2012a; Back and and Puwar, 2012) to visual sociology scholarship, and to bring further knowledge on an understudied mobilities phenomenon. Walking, photographing, and doing sound recordings, were the main practices mobilized in the (uneven) engagement with field places, complemented with participant observation, interviews and informal conversations. My multi-sited fieldwork was based in Lisbon (for six months), Barcelona (for three months), and included shorter periods in Tilbury, Dover, Bergen/Oslo, and Le Havre. A set of visual and aural materials gathered along this journey, key along the research process are, also, part of this thesis, as alternative, evidential and evocative, paths to knowledge. Theoretically, this work is framed by the new mobilities paradigm (Urry, 2000; Sheller and Urry, 2006b; Sheller, 2014), but further critical social sciences literature is mobilized, mostly with regards to post-industrial port cities and their waterfronts (Hoyle, 1994, 2000; Sieber, 1991; Chaline and Malta, 1994; Schubert, 2008), and to cruise ship tourism (Wood, 2002, 2006; Weaver, 2006; Chin, 2008; Clancy, 2008). Based on my empirical research, I will problematize the common understanding of infrastructures as fixed and immobile prevailing in the new mobilities paradigm (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry, 2006), arguing that cruise terminal infrastructures are rather elastic, dynamic, and partly mobile infrastructures. This research foregrounds both the everyday practices and long-term transformations that cruise aquamobilities are bringing to post-industrial port-cities – through new social, material, spatial and temporal dynamics.