Sensitive Communication with Proximate Messmates

The research at hand experiments with the communication that occurs in the encounters and entanglements between human and more-than-human agencies. It builds on the emerging debates on qualitative methodologies informed by new materialism, which help us recognize how more-than-humans can communicate and participate in producing and sharing knowledge. The main purpose of this article is to introduce the approach of sensitive communication with human and more-than-human others in tourism settings. The article explores and tests sensitive reading as a way of conducting research on sensitive communication in proximate surroundings by presenting two empirical examples from Iceland and Sweden. The research is driven by curiosity about the different ways of communicating with and about mundane and ordinary places in the context of proximity tourism. The idea of proximity refers here to curious and caring relations toward our proximate surroundings, beings, and thoughts. This approach to proximity tourism reopens ideas of nearness and farness and offers an alternative approach to current quantitative macrolevel discussions and inquiries of the Anthropocene.