Emma Lundin, a U. of I. doctoral student in tourism, spent two months in a rainforest reserve in Sri Lanka shadowing forest guides. Lundin sought to understand how the guides interact with other-than-humans to create tourism experiences. Tourists’ encounters with life forms and organisms that flourish in these spaces can have long-lasting and devastating consequences, which makes it critical to study these interactions and understand tourism as more-than-human, Lundin argues.

Check out Emma's piece on her research in Sri Lanka on our GradLIFE blog!

"The walking “with” method recognizes that nonhumans are co-producers of these tourism experiences and enables me to explore how they interact with us and influence what and how we communicate about them.

I use multispecies ethnography – a genre of writing and anthropological research that is sensitive to the lives and needs of nonhuman organisms – to study how the human guides and other-than-humans interact.

This requires attentiveness to sensory experiences, while recognizing that I cannot detect or experience everything that is around me due to the limitations of my human body and senses."