My research focuses on gender, nationhood, and whiteness in tourism. An ongoing project, conducted in collaboration with Klara Arnberg (Södertörn University and Stockholm University) and Riikka Taavetti (University of Turku), explores gender, sexuality, and nation building in ferry traffic between Sweden and Finland, focusing on the marketing of cruise ferries in terms of romance and luxury, as well the ferry as a place for entertainment, partying and hooking up. One sub-study focuses on themed cruises as a way of transforming the space of the ferries into floating festivals with different focuses and themes, such as LGBTQ and rave cruises.

A previous study of ethnic tourism examines how difference, otherness, and whiteness characterize tourist emotions, experiences, and practices. The essay collection Turistisk vithet och begäret till den andra (Tourist Whiteness and Desire for the Other, Tankekraft, 2017) explores the close intertwining of whiteness and tourist discourses, practices, and desires in the form of tourism known as “ethnic tourism.” Ethnic tourism is analyzed as a reflection of a tourist position of whiteness that is shaped around a fundamental orientation towards the other—a desire for the other.

A related theme is how gender and notions of family life are interwoven with the meanings of travel, for example, how travel as a way of breaking with norms around age and gender appears in older female travelers' stories about what travel means to them. But also how the marketing of family adventure trips—a small but growing part of the alternative tourism sector in Sweden—reproduces images of the ultimate voyage of discovery into the unknown in a family context.

I am also interested in the pedagogy of travel—how travel in the context of education can provide conditions for embodied learning. In the project “Traveling to learn?”, I studied a dance exchange between a Swedish high school class and a Kenyan cultural school. The research shows how encounters across cultural boundaries can challenge notions of ‘us’ and “them” and open up new perspectives. Dance played a central role in these encounters – as a shared identity that creates a sense of belonging, but also as an area where differences become clear and significant. Through these experiences, students gain insight into different material living conditions and new ways of understanding similarity and difference.