***Apologies for cross posting***

List members might be interested in the following forthcoming conference announcement

 

Things that Move:

The Material Worlds of Tourism and Travel

 

19 – 23 July 2007, Leeds, United Kingdom

 

Things that Move is the fifth in our series of annual conferences. Previous events have focused on the relationships between Tourism and Photography, Tourism and Literature and Tourism and Performance. This event aims to explore the multi-faceted relationships between tourism and material culture – the built environment, consumer and household goods, art, souvenirs, ephemera and landscapes. The themes of this conference emerge within the field of critical tourism studies and related approaches in the social sciences and humanities. We are interested in the political economy, the aesthetics and fabrication of tourism materiality, in the contact zones in which this materiality is given meaning and exchanged, and in the power of this materiality to encapsulate experience and to enable ‘participation’ in social life.

 

Conference Themes

• Themes that the conference will address include:
• Distance, Enchantment and the Power of ‘Exotic’ Objects
• Tourism Souvenirs, Acting Objects and Commodity Fetishism
• Tourism Liturgy, ‘Relics’, and Pilgrimage Shrines in Late Modernity
• The Tourist Object as Metaphor and Memory
• Built Environments, Spatial Design and Architecture for Tourism
• Art, Display and Museographic Elevation in the Postcolonial Era
• Curating for Tourism – Collecting the Worlds of the Tourist
• Asserting Meaning to, Translating and Contesting Objects in Tourism Settings and Performances
• Overcoming the Material Through the Virtual – Future Realms of Tourist Experience

 

Keynote Speakers

Mark Jones, the Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, is one of our keynote speakers. Mark, a former Director of the National Museums of Scotland heads up one of the world’s greatest museums of art and design. The Museum currently features a diverse range of exhibitions including: the evolving image of Kylie Minogue (Kylie—The Exhibition); the shadows of slave trading in contemporary art & design (Uncomfortable Truths); James Athenian Stuart’s ‘rediscovery’ of antiquity in the 18th century; and ‘Surreal Things’ exploring the relations between surrealism and design.

 

Our second keynote speaker, Mitchell Schwarzer, is Chair of Visual Studies and Architecture at California College of the Arts, USA and will give a keynote paper on Architectural Vacation Packages: 6 Name-Brand Architects from $1199. Prof. Schwartzer has widely published on architecture in transnational and tourism contexts. Publications include: German Architectural Theory (1995), Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media (2004), and the upcoming Home Egonomics: America's Obsession with Real Estate.

 

For any enquiry or further information about the conference, accommodation or registration, please contact the conference administrator, Ms Daniela Carl, at [log in to unmask] or in writing to:

Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change

Leeds Metropolitan University

Faculty of Arts and Society

The Old School Board, Calverley Street

Leeds LS1 3ED, United Kingdom

Tel. ++44 (0) 113 283 8541

Fax.++44 (0) 113 283 8544

www.tourism-culture.com