This paper explores the idea of “enclosures” as encircling lines. These include semantic boundaries, insider-outsider binaries, and the gray area that includes the technically illegal and the rarely actually prosecuted, focusing on “wild” campervanning in the Scottish Highlands. Also considered are non-enclosures: common grazing, faraway gazes for driving on single-track roads, and alone time in a campervan that is not easily regimented into work and life. This paper thinks with Tim Ingold’s work on lines, showing how the “ghostly lines” of social imaginaries are changing in light of COVID-19. Lockdowns lead to staycations, which lead to overcrowding in the Highlands. Thus, previously elastic lines are drawn tighter, and gray areas coalesce into lines that are more obviously and more problematically crossed.
Scottish Highlands Campervan Mobilities in Pandemic Times: Enclosures
Phiona Stanley is associate professor in intercultural communications at the Business School, Edinburgh Napier University. Her research is on how people engage in “intercultural” settings in the broadest sense: heterogeneous assemblages of humans, nonhumans, and artefacts. Her new book, An Autoethnography of Fitting In: On Spinsterhood, Fatness, and Backpacker Tourism, was published in 2022 by Routledge as part of the Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives series. email: P.Stanley@napier.ac.uk
Phiona Stanley; Scottish Highlands Campervan Mobilities in Pandemic Times: Enclosures. Journal of Autoethnography 1 July 2022; 3 (3): 398–401. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2022.3.3.398
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