| Summary: |
This conference will address what we broadly identify as the
passions and emotions induced by, or associated with, tourism, travel
and movement. Tourism sets bodies in motion. It makes people move
through unfamiliar grounds. It exposes them to exotic sensations,
to the heat or cold of water, snow and sunshine, to odours, tastes,
smells, colours, and forms that contrast with the aesthetics of
their quotidian environments. It makes them leave their secure spaces
of the familiar and exposes them, in secure doses, to the unfamiliar.
It involves a transgression of the ordinary, an often ritualised
temporary liquidification of moral and aesthetic rules that frame
everyday life.
The emotions of tourism, travel and movement, and the passions through
which these are articulated, are hence directly linked to forms
of motion. Motion disturbs the cognitive order of those in movement
and challenges them to discover the familiar in the unfamiliar,
to reconstruct and reconsider normality through the encounter of
the extraordinary. It challenges them to repossess their bodies,
to rethink the fundament of their being, to reassess the separations
that configure the natures and identities of their belonging. Motion
and the passions through which it is cultivated in tourism and other
fields of movement involves important psychological, economic, ethical
and political issues.
In many ways, motion creates its own frameworks of order and meaning.
How does movement set emotions in motion? How do emotions work in
travel and other movement based practices? How can different understandings
of the concept of passion help to better understand such practices?
What are the social consequences?
This international and interdisciplinary conference is the 7th in
an annual series initiated by the CTCC in 2003. It has become one
of the leading international forums for critical tourism research
and regularly attracts around 130 to 160 participants from different
social sciences and humanities backgrounds. The 2009 edition is
linked to, and will follow, the Royal Anthropological Institute’s
11th International Festival of Ethnographic Film which we host in
Leeds (1-4 July 2009) and which provides an excellent introduction
to some of its themes.
Themes of particular interest include:
- Passions and Desires for Fluidity, Freedom, Friendship, Connection,
- Transhumance, Authenticity, Beauty;
- Passions and Flirts with Danger, Fear and Fantasy in Tourism
and Travel;
- Passions and Transgressions: Eroticism, Liminality, Carnival,
Violence and Power in Tourism and Travel;
- Passions and Joyful Sufferings: Epic Journeys, Mountain Liturgies
and
- Touristic Activities that (may) Hurt;
- Passions and Stendhal Syndromes: Religious and Aesthetic Sublimation
in Tourism, Pilgrimage and Travel;
- Passions and Consumptions: Pleasures and Symbolic Economies
of Eating, Digesting, Excreting in Tourism;
- Passions and Morals in Tourism and Travel: Ambivalences of Encounter,
Ethics, Moral and Legal Frames;
- Passions, Identity and the Making and Unmaking of ‘Passions’
in Culture and Social Performance;
- Economies and Politics of Passion in Tourism, Hospitality and
Travel.
We kindly invite academics at senior or junior level with research
interests in the themes above to submit an abstract electronically
(including a short title, a text of no more than 300 words and full
contact details) to d.picard@leedsmet.ac.uk.
The deadline to receive abstracts
is 1 May 2009.
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