Program

Workshop schedule

10:00-10:15 Welcome and opening

I. Tourism and value

10:15-10:45 Jeroen Nawijn, Too proud: Collective pride and residents’ attitudes towards tourism

10:45-11:15 Willem van der Deijl-Kloeg,  Why Fly? Prudential value, climate change, and the ethics of long-distance leisure travel

11:15-11:25 Break

11:25-11:55 Joint Q&A

11:55-13:00 Lunch

II. Travel, gender, and curiosity

13:00-13:30 Lien Foubert, Beware of female curiosity-seekers! The disruptive force of women travellers in the ancient Mediterranean

13:30-14:00 Pilar Lopez-Cantero, Feminist curiosity as the aim of travel

14:00-14:10 Break

14:10-14:40 Joint Q&A

14:40-15:10 Coffee Break

III. Tourist imagination

15:10-15:40 Stijn Reinders, Worlds of imagination.  Fiction, heritage, place

15:40-16:10 Ruud Welten, What do you want me to see? On Tourist Desire

16:10-16:20 Break

16:20-17:10 Joint Q&A

Abstracts

Jeroen Nawjin, Too proud: Collective pride and residents’ attitudes towards tourism

Pride is generally seen as a positive individual emotion and collectively as a positive indicator of residents’ attitudes towards tourism. I argue that, given specific conditions, there is a tipping point at which residents’ collective pride can turn into a negative attitude towards tourism (development). Based on the discussion, existing interventions in tourism related to collective pride as a desired outcome are critically reviewed.

Willem van der Deijl-Kloeg,  Why Fly? Prudential value, climate change, and the ethics of long-distance leisure travel

It is clear that long-distance travel has a significant negative impact on the problem of climate change. However, does this mean that flying is morally impermissible? We argue that this is not necessarily so, but that this depends on the benefits flying, which may be substantial.

Lien Foubert, Beware of female curiosity-seekers! The disruptive force of women travellers in the ancient Mediterranean

Writers in Antiquity recognised curiosity and desire as catalysts for human movement. They characterised travellers as curiosity-seeking sightseers, a representation that was not without ambiguity as both male and female travellers were criticised for exhibiting restless behaviour if they lost sight of their entrusted primary tasks en route. In this presentation, I will illustrate this with examples from Christian and non-Christian writings of travellers who journeyed across the ancient Mediterranean. I will in particular focus on the gendered discourses that shaped the anecdotes of ancient curiosity-seekers.

Pilar Lopez-Cantero, Feminist curiosity as the aim of travel

In my talk, I discuss feminist curiosity as a necessary condition for good travel. Feminist curiosity does not only consist on adopting a female outlook, but has a more general deconstructive aim: it “privileges collaborative inquiry and a generous listening to the embodied, material realities of the here and now” (Zurn, 2021). Translated to the ethics of travel, this deconstructive attitude is in direct opposition with the inquisitiveness and impartial observation that are traditionally attributed to the good traveller. I argue that this attitude is an essential condition of good travelling, and the starting point for eventual better policies with respect to tourist practices.

Stijn Reinders, Worlds of imagination.  Fiction, heritage, place

This lecture focuses on media tourism: people travelling to places associated with film, TV-series, games or other forms of popular culture. More in particular, I aim to share some results of the project “Worlds of Imagination”. This ERC funded project was based on a comparative approach to examples of media tourism in India, Scotland, Korea, Brazil and the Caribbean. In order to investigate the roles and impacts of the multiple stakeholders that are involved in these four countries, the term ‘imaginative heritage’ is introduced. In particular, I refer to the multitude of popular, fictional narratives that have been projected upon or appropriated by specific sites throughout time and that together make up an important part of local place identity. As I will argue, imaginative heritage results from an active involvement of not only locals, fans and tourists, but also the media industries, the tourism industries and the local governments. By addressing the power configurations behind these heritage and tourism practices, I aim to contribute to a more holistic understanding of media tourism and, more in general, the reciprocal nature of the relation between fiction, heritage and place.

Ruud Welten, What do you want me to see? On Tourist Desire

For centuries people travel around the world. Today, travel drift is greater than ever. Tourists want to see the world, but what is this desire that makes us obsessively wander all over the planet? It is not hard to see that travel has something to do with desire. But what is desire, or more precisely, how is desire structured in tourism? The lecture is an attempt to make sense of tourist desire using the psychoanalytic/structuralist theory of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). How can we understand tourism from the famous dictum ‘desire is desire of the Other’?