Monday, July 9, 2018

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




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:
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.