ISA Call for Papers on the theme of ‘Critical Thinking in Tourism Studies’ for Tourism, Culture and Communication



 

 

 

 

We are pleased to announce a NEW Call for Papers on the theme of ‘Critical Thinking in Tourism Studies’ for Tourism, Culture and Communication, managed by Guest Editors Rodanthi Tzanelli, University of Leeds, UK and Maximiliano Korstanje, University of Palermo, Argentina. This Special Issue is a COLLABORATIVE PUBLICATION between TCC and ISA (The International Sociological Association) via the latter's Research Committee (RC50) on 'International Tourism'  Commissioning Editors are Keith Hollinshead (TCC) and Rukeya Suleman (RC50 / ISA).

The importance of criticality in the development of different analytical traditions in tourism studies is indisputable. Whether they focus on Marxist-inspired critiques of industrial production, in which tourism is a ‘consciousness industry’ (Enzensberger 1974), on Wallerstein’s ‘systems theory’ in which an exploitative European ‘world centre’ caters for tourist demand to consume peripheral exoticism (Greenwood 1977; Britton 1989), on  occulocentric practices organised by ‘experts’ and consumed by clients (Urry 1999, 2002; Hollinshead 2009), or on the deployment of tourism as a performative tool for collective self-aggrandizement by states and communities (MacCannell 1973; Edensor 2002), such arguments seek to promote particular modes of critical thinking.

As early as the 1940s, Frankfurt School-inspired critical theory equipped tourist studies scholarship with appropriate tools to examine tourism as an economic process, a multi-industry and a social fact (von Wiese 1930; Bornmann 1931). Indeed tourism’s contribution to an essential division of human activities between work and leisure in Western and European societies (Krippendorf 1986) --- which coincided with the institution of paid holidays as a universal right (1940) --- fed into such arguments, so the critical turn became entangled in globalised/Europeanised institutional changes, inducing new objections to treating tourism as a universal value. From the late 1990s-2000s, a ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (with its ‘critical mobilities’ branch (Söderström et al. 2013)) breathed new life into these debates by employing new methodological and epistemological tools from Complex Adaptive Systems and Actor-Network Theory, in which ‘systems’ comprise more or other-than-human actants that propel different types of human performance in tourism (Sheller and Urry 2004; Hannam et al. 2006).

Regardless of their differences, all these arguments and schools share an interest in the promotion of critical thinking. This Special Issue seeks to bring to academic discourse what ‘critical thinking’ truly is as an epistemic mode favouring systems, or a form of structural and/or agential meaning-making performed by host communities, tourists, tourist design industries and scholars in tourist studies and other cognate fields.

Topics:

Some indicative but not exhaustive themes for possible papers are:

• The importance of systems theory today (e.g. considerations of tourism as a multi-system; tourism and complexity theory)
• New forms and styles of criticality in tourism analysis
• Implementations of critical thinking in contemporary socio-cultural contexts of tourism (e.g. disaster zones, military tourism, dark and slum tourism or Brexit)
• Critical tourism studies and modes of host, guest or industrial agency
• New critiques of traditional critical theory in the field (e.g. problematic prioritizations of the economic or the political over the cultural or aesthetic as a critical mode)
• Critical thinking and (re)definitions of ‘tourism’ and the ‘tourist’

 

Submissions: Abstracts of 300 words which contribute to knowledge about the role of critical thinking in tourism contexts should be submitted by email to both r.tzanelli@leeds.ac.uk and mkorst@palermo.edu by no later than 15 February 2019. Please email us your abstracts under the title ‘RC50/ISA CfP Abstract Submission’.

The abstracts will enter a peer review process, from which only successful applicants will be invited to submit full manuscripts. The deadline for submission of first drafts of manuscripts is 15 March 2019. Deadline for receipt of first drafts of manuscripts is 1 July 2019. Accepted papers will normally be limited to 7000 words, max.

 

 

 

 

 

NEW MONOGRAPH: Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development: On Atmospheres, Affects, and Environments

Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development: On Atmospheres, Affects, and Environments

By Rodanthi Tzanelli

Routledge  URL: https://www.routledge.com/Cinematic-Tourist-Mobilities-and-the-Plight-of-Development-On-Atmospheres/Tzanelli/p/book/9781138388673 

Description

It is said that movies have encroached upon social realities creating tourism enclaves based on distortions of history and heritage, or simulations that disregard both. What localities and nation-states value are discarded, suppressed, or modified beyond recognition in neoliberal markets; thus flattening out human experience, destroying natural habitats in the name of development, and putting the future of whole ecosystems at risk.

Without disregarding such developmental risks Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development explores how, en route to any beneficial or eco-destructive development, film tourist industries co-produce atmospheres of place and culture with tourists/film fans, local activists, and nation-states. Drawing on international examples of cinematically-induced tourism and tourismophobic activism, Tzanelli demonstrates how the allegedly unilateral industry-driven ‘design’ of location stands at a crossroads between political structures, systems of capitalist development, and resurgent localised agency.

With an interdisciplinary methodological and epistemological portfolio connected to the new mobilities paradigm, this volume will appeal to scholars, students, and practitioners interested in tourism, migration, and urban studies in sociology, anthropology, geography, and international relations.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1_Introduction

Chapter 2_On touring the world: an epistemontological frame

Phantasmagoric palimpsests: twenty-first-century cinematic tourist atmospheres

Cities and countrysides: toward a new cinematic tourist mobilities paradigm

Western/European practice on the bar? Heritage and the holistic plea for life

Chapter 3_Attuning and aligning: synaesthesia and the making of worlds

An ecoaesthetics of worldmaking in cinematic pilgrimage

A primer in epistemontological investigation

Chapter 4_Mobile design: a purposeful pilgrimage into cinematic tourist sites

Carving mobilities: a preliminary statement

Poly-graphic design: a selection of case studies

The island of order(-ing): freedoms and burdens in Orientalisation

Chapter 5_The ‘hubris of the zero point’: three responses

Towards a choreutics of ecosocial action

Epistemic misalignment

Hostipitality

Postindustrial disobedience

Islands of disorder and choreosophies of potentia

Chapter 6_Crafting the impossible, meddling with the anthropocenic puzzle

Classroom experiments, lessons learned

Windows of darkness: degrowing and enfolding

Windows of hope: from heritage to identity reinterpretation

Bibliography

Reviews

Over recent decades, many commentators on tourism and travel have condemned the managerialist narrownesses by which the twin fields are being almost exclusively taught and researched. In producing this book on 'Cinematics', the cultural sociologist Rodanthi Tzanelli seeks to correct for this large shortfall of schooling and awareness by producing a rich and deep inspection of the political ecology of tourism as she examines the ways in which 'the unchecked neoliberalism' of organised industrial development readily rubs up against 'native knowledges' / 'local aesthetics'. Thus, in this study, tourism is critically inspected by Tzanelli as a professional sphere of privatopias (i.e., as forms of worldmaking monoculture) which readily unsettles alternative communal / interest-group outlooks. She illustrates (via a broad mix of scenarios from across the world) how the governing systems and the inscriptive processes of tourism are so often limited in their imaginative capacity to detect (or even care about?) other vistas of inheritance or other voices of being and becoming.

—Professor Keith Hollinshead, Independent Scholar: England and Australia (Public Culture, Public Heritage, Public Nature)

A fascinating exploration of the complex processes involved in the global expansion of cinematic tourism, which challenges simplistic interpretations through its versatile handling of concepts and its analysis of complex relations, contradictions and dilemmas involving humans and non-humans.

—Professor John Eade, University of Roehampton/University of Toronto

Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development is an exciting and much-needed addition to the literature on media tourism and the field of (heritage) tourism studies more generally. Twelve years after the publication of The Cinematic Tourist, Tzanelli’s 'sequel' offers another adventurous exploration into the phenomenon of media tourism (or rather, as Tzanelli prefers, contents tourism), this time using case studies of cinematic tourist development to discuss the critical challenges and conflicting interests of contemporary global tourism. Along the way, Tzanelli also reflects on an impressive and original range of (new) theories and (native) approaches to deal with the complex political ecologies of developing filmed locations into touristified spaces.

—Prof. Dr. Stijn Reijnders and Dr. Emiel Martens, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Confronted with over-tourism, increasingly designed environments as well as the spread of local and activist responses to the global mobility systems affording these, Tzanelli provides a staggering assemblage of eastern and western ideas as part of a truly cosmopolitan analysis, critique and call for action. A must-read for all critical students of mobility, tourism and urban/spatial transformations.

—Professor Michael Haldrup, Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University

Plenary Presentation, ITAM 2018, University of Liverpool, 5 July 2018

The Eighth International Tourism and Media (ITAM) Conference5-7th July, 2018 Liverpool, UK

Presentation: The Production of Location: Imagineering Atmospheres

PPT on SlideShare HERE

The eighth ITAM conference aim is to continue the network’s exploration of new ideas and debates sprung from the intersection between tourism industries and practices and those that broadly relate to the fields of media and communication. In this vein, the conference will aim to provide a forum where, taking their lead from Rodanthi Tzanelli’s concept of ‘global sign industries’ (2007) interdisciplinary research conversations gather pace around what are increasingly convergent fields of study and practice. While trends in scholarship on tourism and media are often reflective of discreet disciplinary dispositions, particularly those linked to perspectives in marketing and business, the necessarily open and ‘undisciplined’ terrain that defines the critical landscapes of the relationship between various forms of media and tourism today demands a similarly open and undisciplined approach to keep pace with what is an ever-shifting and multi-stranded field of study.

The overarching theme of this conference is the production of location and we invite contributions that critically addresses questions of cultural brokerage in media tourism whilst continuing to warmly welcome submissions from the inter- and cross-disciplinary traffic that informs the research on media and tourism and addresses a range of topics pertinent to both areas.  

Rodanthi's presentation connects to her forthcoming monograph:

Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development: On Atmospheres, Affects and Environments

It is said that movies have encroached upon social realities, creating tourism enclaves based on distortions of history and heritage, or simulations that disregard both. What localities and nation-states value is discarded, suppressed or modified beyond recognition in these neoliberal markets, flattening out human experience, destroying natural habitats in the name of development, and putting the future of whole ecosystems at risk. Without discarding such developmental risks, Tzanelli stresses that en route to any beneficial or eco-destructive development, film tourist industries co-produce atmospheres of place and culture with tourist/film fans, local activists and nation-states. This perspectival shift from vague takes on neoliberal expansion/destruction to relational production of popular culture, heritage and identity first occurs in non-representational regimes of affect and emotion. Indeed, the affective potential of post-industrial atmospheres of cinematically-inspired tourism informs both creative labour in tourism and locally-driven cultures of protest against overtourism and environmental destruction. As a result, the allegedly unilateral industry-driven ‘design’ of location stands at a crossroads between political structures, systems of capitalist development and resurgent localised agency.