The American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group (ATIG) is currently soliciting proposals for the ATIG-sponsored session, (an “invited panel”) to be held at during the AAA Meetings in Minneapolis, November 16-20, 2016.
Prospective Invited Panel proposals should prioritize the use of tourism as an analytical framework or object of analysis, and should contribute to the anthropology of tourism, broadly conceived. Panels that focus on the critical examination of the 2016 meeting’s theme, “Evidence, Accident, Discovery” are especially welcome. (A full description of the meeting theme can be found at http://www.americananthro.org/AttendEvents/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=1695&navItemNumber=696 . Proposed panels conceptualized on issues other than the AAA meeting theme will also be considered.
The 115th Annual Meeting theme, ‘Evidence, Accident, Discovery’, raises issues central to debates within both anthropology and politics in a neoliberal, climate-changing, social media-networked era: What counts as evidence, and what does evidence count for? What are the underlying causes and foreseeability of violence and catastrophes? How is misfortune interpreted, and causality, attributed in cases of humanly-preventable harm? And in the give and take of relationships on which anthropological evidence typically depends, who gets to claim that they discovered something? Tourism is ideally poised to take on these issues, from the treatment of tourism as a voyage of discovery to examining the effects of such “discovery” on all groups impacted; from examining its benefits to interrogating the root causes of its catastrophic (or potential) catastrophic socio-cultural, environmental, and political-economic impacts; from understanding the evidence one uses to foster “tourist imaginaries” to deploying evidence to contest the same imaginaries. We welcome submissions that deal with any or all of these important themes of evidence-accident-discovery.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
- “Accidental” tourism
- Neoliberal tourism policies and its effects
- Performances of discovery in a globalized age of mediation
- Social media and tourism
- Souvenirs as “evidence”
- The continued role of “discovery” in tourism processes
- The destruction of cultural heritage and its impacts on tourism processes
- The politics and economics of tourism encounters
- The role of affect in tourism practices
- Tourism and climate change
- Tourism and sustainability
- Tourism as a catastrophe
- Tourism as a means of fostering well-being
- Tourism mishaps and their unexpected effects
- Tourism pressures on cultural and natural heritage
- Violence and tourism
- Virtual voyages of discovery
- What constitutes touristic “evidence”
Deadline for proposal submission: Friday, March 25, 2016
ATIG will notify submitters of its selection by Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Proposals Must Include:
- Title and Abstract of proposed session
- Names of Session organizer(s), affiliation, contact email(s), and phone
- List of Papers, including titles, abstracts, author names and affiliations
Submit by email as attachment to: Michael A. Di Giovine, Program Chair, at michael@michaeldigiovine.com