Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British
Geographers)
Manchester, 26-28 August 2009
First call for papers
Imaginative, virtual and communicative travel: complement to, or substitute
for, tourism?
Sponsored by the Geography of Leisure and Tourism Research Group (GLTRG)
The field of tourism studies has been slow to acknowledge the potential for
imaginative, virtual and communicative travel, associated with a range of
analogue and digital devices that allow us to access other places and people
(s) at the touch of a button without the need for co-presence (from colour
television sets and video cassette recorders to portable computers and
wireless broadband). However, inspired by ideas and techniques drawn from
Mobilities (a new ‘movement-driven’ social science incorporating the work of
geographers and sociologists), a growing number of researchers are
investigating the role of these devices as accessories to, and even surrogates
for, physical or corporeal leisure travel (tourism).
Several such devices interface with the World Wide Web and, in particular,
the so-called second generation of web-based services that allow people to
collaborate and share information. Accordingly, this session seeks papers that
explore one or more of the following:
– tourism and Web 2.0 (i.e. blogs, podcasts, social networking sites, online
video, RSS, tagging, mash-ups, wikis, etc);
– virtual worlds as tourism spaces (e.g. Second Life and other examples of
Massively Multiplayer Online Social Games, or MMOSGs);
– the motivations and experiences of software developers, end-users, etc;
– mobile methodologies and methods suited to researching imaginative, virtual
and communicative leisure travel (e.g. netnography);
– legal and ethical issues (e.g. verifying the authenticity and truthfulness of
internet communication, permitting behaviours in virtual worlds which would be
impossible or intolerable in the real world);
– threshold concepts of relevance to the above (e.g. liminality, liquid
modernity); and
– (tourism) geographies of cyberspace.
Proposed papers, in the form of a 200 word abstract, should be submitted to
the session convenor by 6th February 2009.
For more details, and to submit an abstract, please contact:
Dr Tim Gale
Department of Geography and Environmental Management
University of the West of England, Bristol
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