Locating Imagination in Popular Culture Place, Tourism and Belonging

This chapter explores the novel research area of toy tourism, or mobile and imaginative toy play, linking popular material culture, media studies, tourism studies, and play studies. Toy tourism is investigated through the activities of playful individuals who follow travelling toys. Based on a qualitative and multimethod approach, the research material includes interview data and survey responses, in which toy fans and geocachers share their experiences of toy tourism both in the physical world and online. The approach also includes participatory observation and autoethnographic play, as we actively participated in toy tourism during the study. To examine the significance of playing with toys in the context of travelling and imaginative practices, the chapter focuses on the motivations of players interested either in free-form and self-expressive play or game-like and rule-bound contest, and we build on these ideas to present a typology of toy tourism. As the chapter shows, toys become mobile through amateur and professional practitioners of toy tourism, who may have parasocial relationships to toys and are motivated by either paedic or ludic forms of play. In both instances of play, the practitioners of toy tourism express an interest in visual storytelling.