SPEAKER SERIES - JOLYNNA SINANAN

(Way)finding Everest: Mobile media and map apps in repertoires of contemporary trekking

7 December 2023, 14:00-15:30
Room: 12A226

Abstract

Following the Mount Everest avalanches of 2014 and again in 2015 due to the Nepal earthquake, the state government and private telecommunications corporations have made a committed effort to increase mobile connectivity and digital infrastructure in the largely remote and underdeveloped Khumbu region. This recently improved mobile infrastructure has coincided with an increase in the number of tourists arriving in the region between 2016 and 2018.

A perhaps unintended consequence for the tourist encounter is the transformation of relationships between tourists, populations who work in the tourist industry and the production and circulation of regional knowledge. Trekkers frame map apps within narratives of research and expertise in independent travel, which emphasises self-reliance. The implications of map app practices include reduced representation and valorisation of regional knowledge in trekking navigation. Further, geographical information available through map apps is largely generated by open-source contributors based in countries in the Global North.

This discussion illustrates the ways in which individual, interpersonal encounters (between tourists, technologies and workers) are reflective of wider contexts of global digital infrastructural relations.    

Bio

Dr Jolynna Sinanan is a Lecturer in Digital Anthropology in the Department of Social Anthropology and the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Trinidad, Nepal, Australia and Cambodia and has published widely on digital and data practices, digital visual communication, intergenerational mobilities, work and gender. 

Her books include Social Media in Trinidad (2017, UCL Press), Visualising Facebook (with D. Miller 2017, UCL Press) and Digital Media Practices in Households (with L. Hjorth et al. 2021, Amsterdam University Press). Jolynna's current research is developing a long-term ethnography of the Everest economy.