Page - 11 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert, Sandra Vlasta | Travel Writing 11 mobile subject and the travellee (Pratt 1992: 242; Smethurst 2019) as immobile — a construct that can be found in much travel writing — must also be approached critically. New forms of travelling and travel writing have sought to undermine the dominant understanding of travel as a practice that necessarily encompasses physical mobility. The New Zealand photographer Jacqui Kenny, for example, cannot travel physically because she suffers from agoraphobia and anxiety. She has therefore turned to travelling the world via Google Street View, and the photographs she takes on her virtual travels are so fascinating that they have been featured not only on her Instagram feed but also in exhibitions (with a book-length publication in the works).2 Similarly, the English priest Ruth Lampard, who was unable to walk the Camino de Santiago (Way of St James) due to health problems, decided to go on a virtual pilgrimage instead, charting the (relatively short) distances she was able to walk per day on a map, looking for blogs and YouTube videos about the corresponding sections of the Camino and then tweeting about her experiences on Twitter.3 As her poor health also limited her ability to read and write, Twitter was an ideal medium for documenting her travel, allowing her to link her messages to videos and articles. Currently, Ruth Lampard is walking and tweeting about the Te Araroa Trail in New Zealand in a similar manner. Virtual travel may become more of a trend in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pan- demic, which has had an unprecedented impact on the practice of travel given the closing of borders not only between different countries but even between certain regions within countries. Business travel has largely been replaced by video conferences, and the potential uses of online tools in academia have been explored in unprecedented ways. While conferences were cancelled due to the pandemic, the number of webinars increased significantly. As physical mobility became restricted in various ways, virtual mobility was taken to a new level in 2020 — with both positive and negative consequences. In the weeks of the lockdown, newspaper travel sections contained fewer and fewer travel reports, and reading travel writing was featured as an alternative to travelling during the pan- demic.4 Destinations such as Barcelona and Venice, which had suffered from over-tourism for many years, became largely deserted urban spaces; on television, daring reporters were shown standing in an empty St Mark’s Square. It is too early to speculate on how the experience of the pandemic and its consequences for travel will affect the genre of travel writing. As a theme, it will certainly be reflected in future travelogues. Perhaps more interesting, however, is the question of whether it will also have an impact on the — already heterogeneous — forms associated with the genre of travel writing, which in many cases is defined by the way in which text and visual forms relate to each other. 2 https://www.instagram.com/streetview.portraits/; https://www.theagoraphobictraveller.com/. 3 See her Twitter account @ruth_lampard. 4 See, for example, contributions in the Austrian press such as ‘Unterwegs in Wort und Bild’, Die Presse, 21–22 March 2020; ‘Reisen im Kopf’ in Freizeit, Kurier, 18 April 2020. Under the heading ‘Vor Kurzem noch am Ende der Welt’ (Die Presse 28–29 March 2020), travel authors wrote about how they spent their time in the lock- down. Other articles featured tours that offer new perspectives on familiar places, such as the Vienna Walking Week (cf. ‘Urlaub für Wiener in Wien’, Die Presse 19 April 2020).