-> This web installation/audiovisual article is based on the mobile fieldwork I have been carrying out between 2011 and 2015 among tractor unit drivers employed in West European forwarding companies who are responsible for cross-border transport in Denmark, Germany, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway. The research has been conducted in accordance with the principles of mobile ethnography with the use of autoethnographic elements and the anthropology of sound assumptions. In other words, I have conducted this research from the perspective of a co-participant in long-haul transport operations carried out by a given driver, sharing a three-metre space in a tractor unit cab and taking part in their activities. I started the research in 2011. My aim was to find a new field which I could study from a long-term perspective and whose specific features would allow me to use new research techniques connected to, among others, the assumptions of multi-sited ethnography. The reason why I started this study was not strictly academic. It was my personal fascination with landscapes and soundscapes that provide the context for the work of tractor unit drivers as an occupational group: road infrastructure, roadside spaces and industrial areas such as harbours, foundries, processing plants and warehouses where loading and unloading of goods takes place. These are spaces which I am particularly fond of due to their visual and acoustic features.
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Agata Stanisz: social anthropologist working as associate professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan/Poland, fieldrecordist, anthro-sound-artist. Since 2011 deals with dromology and road studies, conducts reseach projects on the freight, road infrastructure, regimes of mobilitiy, stilness and infrastructural rituals. The author and coordinator of the first Polish anthropological podcast "Anthropofon".
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special thanks to: Maciej Wirmański (Szara Reneta), Paul Vickers from Regensburg (field notes translation), Krzysztof Kiełpiński (driver's log correction), Wanda Wasilewska (finding Krzysztof Kiełpiński)
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