Becoming Fragile

Our chapter springs from discussions about our roles as tourism researchers in the Arctic in the midst of ecological crisis. We see this chapter as an opportunity to become and stay proximate with the idea of fragility as a collective space where we recognise our weaknesses, dependencies, and solidarities—the fragility of life. We approach fragility as a relational notion helping us to gain new understandings of our entanglements with the more-than-human world and as a vital element of carefull research orientations. As our inspiration, we use memory recalling, looking back, and writing about our experiences as tourism researchers at the University of Lapland. The feminist memory-work method highlights the collective construction of memories through sharing, discussing, and theorising about them as a whole. Applying collective memory work on and with fragility offers us a research method that we have started to call a collective fragility work. Our stories underline the importance of recognising our shared fragilities in relational approaches of becoming—of being and living in the damaged world and engaging in research from those premises.