Travelling as Being: Understanding Mobility Amongst Scottish Gypsy Travellers

Abstract

This paper focuses on the mobility of Scottish Gypsy Travellers as a part of their way of life. It considers both the imaginative and corporeal travel of these people within northeast Scotland. The paper uses Heidegger's conceptual thinking to understand their being on the move. It emphasises the primacy of the process of movement before signification and coding and offers thinking through affectivity, emergence, and potentiality to recognise multiple ways through which travelling people sense place and movement. Through an investigation of the mobile living practices of Scottish Gypsy Travellers and their belonging-together, the paper argues for a relational logic which can attend to the complexity of their involvement with the world.