Abstract: Recently implemented digital infrastructure in the Solukhumbu (Mount Everest) region in Nepal 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. This presentation focuses on map app practices, which results in reduced representation and valorisation of regional knowledge in trekking navigation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I illustrate the ways in which individual, interpersonal encounters (between tourists, technologies and workers) are reflective of wider contexts of global digital infrastructural relations.
Presenter 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 an interdisciplinary background in anthropology and development studies and has conducted comparative ethnographic studies of digital practices and infrastructures in relation to intergenerational mobilities in the Asia-Pacific, the Caribbean and South Asia. She is the author of Social Media in Trinidad (UCL Press, 2017) and the co-author of Digital Media Practices in Households (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), Visualising Facebook (UCL Press, 2017) and How the World Changed Social Media (UCL Press, 2016).
Lecturer in Digital Anthropology in the Department of Social Anthropology and the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropolog, University of Manchester
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.