Transformative travel : the socially mobile de/construction of reality

Physical travel has traditionally been viewed as an agent of transformation. The research conducted on this topic, however, is surprisingly narrow in scope. Few studies have attempted to look beyond a particular tourism/travel segment or discipline and most utilise a restricted range of methods and analysis. These investigations have also failed to consider the long-term impacts of corporeal travel and how changes continue to evolve over time. This study conducts a holistic and interdisciplinary exploration of transformative travel. It draws upon the experiences and observations of 78 participants (representing a wide-variety of nationalities, ages and experiences), sourced and interviewed over four years using internet-based methods, along with the researcher’s own travels through South-East Asia, West Africa and Europe. The thesis blends theoretical analysis and mobile methods with stories and visuals to capture the rich, sensual, emotive and complex nature of travel, along with building multiple layers of understanding of transformation through travel. The research finds that in a modern, mobile world it becomes increasingly difficult for individuals to distance themselves from those elements that maintain a particular way of thinking and acting. While a traveller may physically remove their body from a specific geographic location, contemporary and historic flows of people, ideas, information, objects, memories and symbols create mobile spaces, places, landscapes and identities; both familiarity and difference abound. As such, transformative travel is a complex phenomenon. Innumerable elements interact in a multitude of permutations and combinations ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ physical travel, making the delivery and prediction of particular outcomes improbable. Travel is perpetual, taking place not only corporeally, but communicatively, virtually, imaginatively and symbolically. As a result, travel, in all its forms, continually acts to construct, maintain and transform individual and collective realities. At its broadest, human travel might be conceptualised, not simply as movement from one place to another, but as a shift in conscious attention. Physical travel becomes one of many flows in the socially mobile de/construction of reality