Hallo!

The Young Researchers International Meeting on "Rethinking structuring dichotomies of social sciences through the field of tourism" will be held in Paris 19 – 21 September (http://www.univ-paris1.fr/colloques/rencontres-internationales-de-jeunes-chercheurs).

In addition to papers presentations, a few seminars will discuss specific dichotomies.

I am in charge of organising a seminar where participants will be called to discuss “production vs. consumption” (and beyond) with reference to the tourism domain - see the bottom of this email for a better understanding.

While we have already selected a few texts for discussion, I am still looking for non-academic materials such as short documentaries, pieces of fiction, magazines articles or anything else that might be good for stimulating the discussion. Is there anyone who has something to suggest with specifical reference to urban and spatial implications? (They should be either in French or in English).

Thank you for your help!

Cheers,

Chiara Rabbiosi

Dr. Chiara Rabbiosi,

Urban and Local European Studies, Ph.D.

2013 Scuola Superiore di Scienze Turistiche, Università di Bologna, Polo Scientifico-Didattico di Rimini (Italy)

2012 Equipe Interdisciplinaire de Recherches sur le Tourisme, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (France)

From the conference call:

Many authors associate the emergence of a noticeably new world (post-modern, hyper-modern, etc.) with a paradigm shift, embodied by the transition from a society of production to a society of consumption. In this context, consumption replaces production as an explicatory factor of the main socio-economic dynamics of the contemporary world. The relevance of the binary dichotomy between processes of production and of consumption is disputed. Talking about objects or spaces of consumption implies that these spaces are created – or produced – to be consumed, consumption being the ultimate goal, the actualization of the process, while this process actually appears as the result of a much larger movement, whose roots can be traced back to the production of objects or spaces.

Tourism is a relevant field to question this dichotomy. Tourism activity has been conceived as a match between produced objects – the object, the resource, or the place said to be “touristic”, even sometimes the cultures and populations – and consuming subjects – the tourists –. Some researchers study the production of territories while others analyze their consumption by tourists. Rethinking this division can allow us to interrogate anew the elements that are produced for tourist consumption, including the power and domination relationships implied by these processes, at different scales (tourist imaginaries, sexual tourism, exploitation, domestic mobilities in poor countries, heritage and architecture of tourist places, authenticity, the role of new medias…). This issue, of the production of tourism, calls for a reflection about the world of labor in this sector, as well as the tension between offer and demand for tourist products (experiential marketing, ready-to-consume environments, tourist bubbles, cultural spaces dedicated to consumption and other hybrid places…). The analysis of the emergence of new forms of tourism (community-based tourism, creative tourism) could also be a relevant perspective to interrogate this dichotomy (productions of tourists themselves, pictures, videos, narratives of travel, the use of social networks, blogs).