Speakers
Description
For many years now, we have seen a rapid increase in the number of people who fly. Flying can be associated with very different narratives, ranging from social mobility, cultural enrichment and personal development to overconsumption and carelessness in the face of climate change, and very different emotions, from pride and joy to shame and guilt (Mkono, 2020, 2022; Gössling et al., 2020; Wormbs & Wolrath Söderberg, 2019; Doran et al., 2021; Andersen, 2022).
In Western Europe, aeromobility has become widespread earlier than in the East and may no longer be seen as distinctive. In addition, with the growing awareness of climate change, flying is not necessarily enjoyable, it can also be shameful. When it has become widespread in many post-socialist countries, what has been considered an aspirational and distinctive practice may already be considered embarrassing or even immoral (Lovelock, 2014; Di Paola & Nyholm, 2023). Do Poles feel ashamed of flying now that they have caught up with the West in terms of long-distance travel? To what extent is the “disenchantment” of the plane also taking place in the countries that have later embarked on the path of high mobility?
To answer this question, we draw on 38 in-depth interviews conducted in Poznań and Tricity twenty years after Poland’s accession to the European Union and the consequent liberalisation of the air transport market. We find that for many Poles, flying is still a distinctive practice and a unique experience that inspires pride. The embeddedness of flying in a diverse repertoire of benefits and rewards makes it necessary to add other notions, such as no-travel shame or travel pride, to analyze the social emotions associated with flying in the post-socialist context and to complement the concept of flight shame developed in the Nordic context.
Biography
Marianna Kostecka is a PhD student in Doctoral School of Social Sciences at the Faculty of Sociology of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Her interests include climate emotions, aeromobility, sociology of families and gender studies. She is a qualitative researcher in a National Science Center research project on Travel Behaviour in Polish Cities: Causality, Behavioural Changes, and Climate Impacts, led by Michał Czepkiewicz, and was co-working in a National Science Center research project on the Empty Nest Phase, led by Magdalena Żadkowska. The presentation is part of a research project funded by National Science Centre in Poland (2020/37/B/HS4/03931).
