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.
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