2005 The End of Tourism?
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CONTEXT
Tim Coles and Colleagues (2004) recently said that “Middle range theories of motivation, decision modelling, and even destination image…, although useful, do little to bridge fairly substantial gaps in our knowledge of tourism as a representation of contemporary social systems” As the contemporary world that produces the tourist becomes increasingly complex it might be argued that there is no such thing as tourism: only production, consumption and mobility. Heritage, arts, architecture, place, space and everyday leisure pursuits are commoditized and drawn into any number of diverse businesses that do not see themselves as having any connection with tourism. Yet their activities are supported by sophisticated global structures of airlines, reservation systems and product/ destination marketing campaigns.
John Urry captures the spirit of the age with his reference to Bauman’s description of a “shift from solid, fixed modernity to a much more fluid and speeded-up ‘liquid modernity’ (2000).” This speeded up version of life and culture (reminding us of Roland Robertson’s early dealings with globalization as “compression of the world and intensification of consciousness” ) is characterised by bodies on the move and travelling cultures.
Aims
Taking the definitions of mobility to be as diverse as “an actor’s competence to realize certain projects and plans while being on the move” to Lancaster University's Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) broader view in which “mobilities encompasses both the large scale movement of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space, and the travel of material things within everyday life” our aim is simply to create a temporary intellectual space for a discussion on how ‘mobility studies’ can help enrich and enlighten our understanding of people on the move.
Themes
Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin, the conference convenor ‘picked over’ the present literature on mobility and assembled/ collaged some ideas that might be useful for our purpose. Colleagues are invited to respond to (but not necessarily be restricted by) the following prompts that can act as our themes:
- The tourist in the context of transnational behaviour: which allows for the recognition of interconnected social networks and the resulting movement between and among multiple localities which may represent particular types of lifestyle mobilities including ‘dual lives’
- Mobility Patterns and Forms of Social Integration Beyond Local Belonging: whereby for some, travel has been a certainty rather than a question… which enables them to realize very specific and sometimes creative solutions for the “compulsion of mobility”
- Connections ‘at a distance’: what is the significance for social life of the intermittent connections, and recurrent patterns of presence and absence resulting from travel and its occasioned encounters
- Liminal Political Spaces: which become a site for voluntary mobility (tourists, pilgrims, immigrants) as well as involuntary travel (refugees, displaced, transferred populations (ethnic cleansing), foreign workers, homeless, undocumented immigrants
- Ephemeral ideas: mobile identities and Diaspora; mobile parties and the significance of low-cost flights; performance in the airport lounge; in search of ‘The Beach’; mobile technologies and the backpacker; the obligation of ‘co-presence’; scapes, flows and corporeal mobility.