Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the way in which the experience of time and distance can influence understandings of home and away, self and other, ordinary and extraordinary. It aims to reconceptualise notions of liminality, arguing for a more fluid and less linear model.

Paper long abstract:

It is well established that travel operates for many people as a transitional moment or experientially significant life-phase, which allows individuals the opportunity to construct, imagine, maintain and reconstruct their identities with reference to the world around them. Situated within a larger research project, which examines the role of extended international travel in the lives of young Australians, this paper examines the way in which the experience of time and distance (whether configured emotionally, socially or physically) can influence understandings of home and away, self and other, ordinary and extraordinary.

By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a variety of international locations and semi-structured in-depth interviews with young Australian backpackers, the paper will discuss concepts of selfhood, national identity, cosmopolitanism and mobility. With a focus on long-term travellers or working-holiday makers (who are 'not quite tourists, not quite locals'), the paper aims to reconceptualise notions of liminality, arguing for a more fluid and less linear model. Ultimately, this would better accommodate subjective and relative notions of strangerhood and belonging and would go some ways to explaining the identity conflicts experienced by those travellers who exist on the margins: travellers who, by virtue of their relationships or careers, are located somewhere between the role of transient backpacker and that of (less-mobile) international expat.

E-paper: this Paper will not be presented, but read in advance and discussed

Paper Download (56 KB)