Narratives of displacement (or “a cartography of the intangible”)

Abstract

Starting from a travel narrative, we draw a parallel between traveling and research in order to define wandering as a method. It is a theoretical work guided by the framework of the new mobilities paradigm. We analyze the meaning of traveling from the perspective of the one who moves. We start from the gaze of someone who launches into the unknown, anticipating what is going to befound at the end of the journey to the perspective of the cartographer, the one who guides his actions as he explores the environment. The tourist metaphor emphasizes that researches on mobilities produces important theoretical-epistemological tensions for social psychology, questioning the nature of the object of study and considers the researcher as an active force in the field. Finally, we state that research requires displacement, and an important contribution of this framework to social psychology and people-environment studies is that the condition for knowledge production on mobilities is the variation of the field and of the researcher’s gaze.