Vannini, Phillip
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Phillip Vannini is an accomplished ethnographer and author who studies subjects such as marine mobilities, off-grid energy assemblages and the social aspects of human embodiment. Vannini’s research interests broadly include material culture, technology and culture, sensory studies and cultural geographies. He maintains a website (http://www.publicethnography.net/) to share his ethnographic work and that of his students. In 2011, Vannini published Ferry Tales (http://ferrytales.innovativeethnographies.net/), a hypermedia book that explores mobility and sense of place and time and time on the British Columbia coast. He is currently studying life off the grid across Canada.
These works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 Canada License.
Recent Submissions
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The GoPro gaze
(cultural geographies, 2017)During 2014–2015, we produced a short video documentary, titled The Art of Wild, which focused on the audiovisual practices of outdoor adventurers. This short written report reflects on an idea inspired by the video: the ... -
Low and slow: Notes on the production and distribution of a mobile video ethnography
(Mobilities, 2017)The present article is a brief reflection accompanying Low and Slow: a 26 min ethnographic video documenting the occupation of commercial floatplane pilots, with a particular focus on their skills, technologies, sense of ... -
Wild walking: A twofold critique of the walk-along method
(Routledge, 2017)Over the last decade the mobile research method known as the “go-along” (in its various manifestations such as the “ride-along” and the “walk-along”) has become increasingly popular. The popularity of the go-along makes ... -
Intensities of mobility: Kinetic energy, commotion, and qualities of supercommuting
(Mobilities, 2016)This paper explores the intensities of long distance commuting journeys in order to understand how bodily sensibilities become attuned to the regular mobilities which they undertake. More people these days are travelling ... -
How to climb Mount Fuji (at your earliest convenience): A non-representational approach
(Routledge, 2016)I am no climber. Though I deeply respect and sometimes even admire the brave souls that put their lives on the line for the sake of mountaineering glory and obsessive goal-achievement, I have always enjoyed my mountains ... -
Dramaturgy and post-structuralism
(Routledge, 2016)The relationship between dramaturgy and post-structuralism—the subject of this chapter—is an uneasy one. Now, Goffman’s work to be sure has vastly appealed to both postmodernists and post-structuralists for various ... -
Storm watching: Making sense of Clayoquot Sound winter mobilities
(Routledge, 2016)From Goa to Bali, from Tuscany to rural and coastal Spain, and from Puerto Vallarta to Palm Springs, one key characteristic of lifestyle migration destinations is clear: warm, sunny climates (e.g. see Gustafson 2009; Korpela ... -
Non-representational ethnography: New ways of animating lifeworlds
(cultural geographies, 2015)Over the last decade and a half, socio-cultural geographies have witnessed a genuine explosion of interest in the ethnographic tradition. Such interest is due in part to the increasing acceptance of non-representational ... -
Ethnographic film and video on hybrid television: Learning from the content, style, and distribution of popular ethnographic documentaries.
(Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 2015)Academic ethnographers have been utilizing film, and more recently video, for a variety of research purposes including the collection, analysis, and dissemination of data. But ethnographic film and video are not the exclusive ... -
Video methods beyond representation: Experimenting with multimodal, sensuous, affective intensities in the 21st century
(Routledge, 2014)I received Charlotte Bates’s kind request to write the conclusion to this fine and timely collection of essays as Jonathan Taggart and I were en route back home after a week spent filming and doing fieldwork on the East ... -
Mentre tu dormivi: Traghetti e pendolari in British Columbia [While you were asleep: Ferries and commuters in British Columbia]
(Lo Squaderno: Explorations in Space and Society, 2014)Cultural critics have made of the commuter a modern popular culture stereotypical figure, characterized by habitual and automatic behavior. Tied to a security belt, hidden behind a newspaper, stuck inside a train coach, ... -
Doing islandness: A non-representational approach to an island's sense of place
(cultural geographies, 2013)This paper presents both an empirical characterization and a theoretical treatment of an island as practice. Through video and ethnographic description we describe and interpret how one kind of islandness is done. Thus we ... -
Constellations of ferry (im)mobility: islandness as the performance and politics of insulation and isolation
(Cultural Geographies, 2011-04)Drawing from three years of fieldwork — including over 250 journeys and about 400 interviews — conducted in ferry-dependent coastal and insular communities of British Columbia, this paper extends the concept of constellation ... -
The techne of making a ferry: a non-representational approach to passengers’ gathering taskscapes
(Journal of Transport Geography, 2011)Drawing upon ethnographic data collected in British Columbia’s ferry-dependent island and coastal communities, non-representational theory, and mobility studies literature this article examines the process of making, or ... -
Constellations of (in-)convenience: disentangling the assemblages of Canada's west coast island mobilities
(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2011)Drawing from fieldwork conducted to examine the roles played by ferry mobilities in the lives of residents of ferry-dependent islands and coastal communities of British Columbia, Canada, this paper focuses on three elements ... -
Performing elusive mobilities: ritualization, play, and the drama of scheduled departures
(Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2011)Drawing upon three years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in ferry-dependent islands and remote coastal communities of British Columbia, this paper examines the process of catching a ferry in time for a scheduled sailing. ... -
A Queen's Drowning: Material Culture, Drama, and the Performance of a Technological Accident
(University of California Press, 2009-08)Drawing on ethnographic data collected among residents of northwest British Columbia's coastal and island residents, I examine a technological accident: the sinking of the M/V Queen of the North. This accident is examined ... -
Toward a Technography of Everyday Life: The Methodological Legacy of James W. Carey's Ecology of Technoculture as Communication
(SAGE Publications, 2009)This article identifies Carey's contributions to the concept of technoculture and attempts to systematize his writings on communication, culture, and technology in order to craft a methodological strategy for the study of ... -
Recontinentalizing Canada: Arctic ice’s liquid modernity and the imagining of a Canadian archipelago
(Island Studies Journal, 2009)Studying mobile actor networks of moving people, objects, images, and discourses, in conjunction with changing time-spaces, offers a unique opportunity to understand important, and yet relatively neglected, “relational ... -
Smell, Odor, and Somatic Work: Sense-Making and Sensory Management
(American Sociological Association, 2008)Sensation (noun) is emergent in joint acts of sensing (verb). To sense, in other words, is to make sense, and sense making entails what we call "somatic work." We investigate these dynamics in the context of olfaction, ...
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