van life

The dominant narratives present "van life" as voluntarily living in a van for the adventure of it.  The duration and frequency of van stints vary.  Some folks go on week-long camping trips several times a year.  Others spend months at a time living in their vans, traveling from the US to Argentina, hitting up all of the Wanderlust festivals, or following around that one jam band.  Van life in its most idealized form (check out #vanlife on IG for the best/worst examples) is all about freedom, simplicity, and escape from the work-a-day world.  In reality, van life can also be expensive, frustrating, and politically problematic.

In the US, van life has a complicated genealogy.  Some of the core concepts and representational practices circulating within van life discourse -- freedom, wanderlust, a rejection of bourgeois consumer culture, the restorative value of nature, and the idealization of indigenous cultures -- connect it to the 1960s counterculture movement in the US and the much older wandervogel movement in Germany.  The prominence of Volkswagen Vanagons and busses within van life only serves to strengthen this connection to the history of the German back-to-nature movement that was so easily incorporated by the Nazi party after World War I.  During World War II, 80% of the VW workforce was slave labor.  (In 1998 VW created a voluntary fund to compensate slave laborers who worked at VW headquarters during WWII.)  In our current political moment, van life raises a number of other difficult questions.  Is van life a form of poverty tourism?  What does it mean to choose homelessness as a fun, temporary experience when racism, ableism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and the criminalization of addiction and mental illness render so many people involuntarily homeless?

ethnography

Can I tell a story about you?

“There’s no way out, short of a radical rethinking of the research enterprise.” - Dwight Conquergood Cultural Struggles

“It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right.  But that, along with plaguing subtle people with obtuse questions, is what being an ethnographer is like.” - Clifford Geertz The Interpretation of Cultures

poststructuralism

How do I make meaning and who am I in the meaning-making?

“In short, this history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature, seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities . . .” Michel Foucault The Archaeology of Knowledge

“I don’t know about the term ‘postmodern,’ but if there is a point, and a fine point, to what I perhaps better understand as poststructuralism, it is that power pervades the very position of the critic; and further, that this implication of the terms of criticism in the field of power is not the advent of a nihilistic relativism incapable of furnishing norms, but, rather, the very precondition of a politically engaged critique.” - Judith Butler Feminists Theorize the Political

vanagon

The Vanagon, one of the most popular and well-photographed vans of #vanlife, is the American name for the Volkswagen Type 2 T3 generation van.  Produced from 1979 - 1992, the Vanagon is the last in a line of rear-engine Type 2 vehicles.  The first Type 2, the T1, was known as the microbus or split-window and was first produced in 1950.  From 1967 - 1979, VW produced the Type 2 T2, known as the bay window bus.  With the T4 model, called the Eurovan, VW switched to a front-engine model.

Vanagons love to eat money, grow rust, and hatch adventures.