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Dear colleagues,
Please
find below the CFP for the second conference of the Tourism-Contact-Culture
(TOCOCU) network
"Regimes of Value in Tourism: Concepts, Politics and Practices"
The conference, jointly organized by TOCOCU and the Kurt
Bösch University Institute will take place in Sion, Switzerland, from
2 to 4 July 2012.
Best regards,
Valerio Simoni
Regimes of Value in Tourism: Concepts, Politics and
Practices
TOCOCU 2nd Biannual Conference
Sion, Switzerland, 2-4 July 2012
The conference aims to explore different concepts of value that emerge
in the social field of tourism. At a general level, we can distinguish here
between value as conceptualized by different academic disciplines and value as
lived, expressed, and embodied by various actors within tourism as practice and
social field. Tourism is often considered a profit generating industry where the
utility value paid by tourists is larger than the exchange value of products
(in classical terms, the cost of production using labor, capital and land).
Yet, a large number of tourism-related practices, services and exchanges escape
any strict definition of commodities—such as forms of free hospitality, sites
located in the public domain, or intangible tourist values such as the
“atmosphere” of a city, the “beauty” of a landscape or artwork, the “purity” of
a natural or spiritual site, the “friendliness” of a local population, etc. It
is an important element of the conference to discuss conceptions of value in
tourism that transcend a strictly economic definition. In this sense we are
interested, on the one hand, in the differentiated emotional, moral and ethical
cultures by means of which tourists experience attractions and assign value. On
the other hand, we wish to explore how various local, regional, national,
international, and transnational actors and instances capture, conceptualize
and assemble economic, political, cultural, spatial value associated with
touristic places.
Debating Value in Tourism
Value is a highly controversial concept. Most debates about value and
regimes of value are transpired by political projects, aims and ideologies. For
some value represents a practical tool to account for the wealth an object or a
practice is able to generate or maintain. For others it is a moral instrument
to govern and legitimize the justice of social action and political order in
society. For others still, it is an essential quality of Self inherited from
various types of relatives, spirits or ancestors. Tourism is one of the social
fields in which these different meanings of, and ideological claims to, value
become visible and often clash. Through the public display of social life,
sites and cultural artifacts, value is mobilized here as a tangible resource,
as an ethical claim and as a cultural device governing tourism production. It
is simultaneously exchange value for touristic producers, utility value for
tourism consumers, magical value for tourists and social and symbolic value for
the participating host societies. Regimes of value in tourism are often either
relativistic (promoting forms of belonging, i.e. nationalism, cosmopolitanism,
ethnicism) or mercantile (heritage economics, tourism economics, heritage
marketing). In all cases, their specific configuration and underlying moral
order, and their ability to impose themselves as dominant model to think about
places reshape entire territories and the life worlds of their inhabitants. For
instance, the historical invention of the seaside, mountains, the picturesque,
and monuments as videnda has led to the emancipation of new spatial values in
and of destinations. Economically, by financing infrastructures for mass
tourism, developing tourism clusters and implicating World Bank sponsored
tourism development programmes, tourism generated a new form of monetary
valorization of land and sites that have not previously had any considerable
“exchange value”. Tourism often induced here a land revolution transforming
formerly marginalized spaces such as seashores, rural centers, remnants of
ancient architecture and mountains into new economic resource bases, by that
means provoking a subversion of previous symbolic meanings and spatial
structures. Politically, it created “growth coalitions” in tourist destinations
where economic and political values of tourism were reconsidered in terms of an
urban development logic of tourist resorts, and where tourist resources became
regulated through law and/or less formal power relationships. Culturally, it
led to the reorganization of societies in terms of emerging tourism cultures,
where tourism related heritage displays and performances began to constitute an
economic and moral value in itself, allowing people in destinations to generate
livelihoods and participate in social life. Ethically, the production and
display of such heritage allowed political stakeholders to emancipate different
claims to identity – e.g. nationalist, ethnic, cosmopolite – as guiding ethical
principle to govern a person’s, community’s or humanity’s being in the world
and thus to operate a civilizing control of violence between people, societies
and cultures. The universalizing ethics of world heritage promoted and
institutionalized by international organizations such as UNESCO represents here
a specific case. A particularly important current issue brought about by
cultural policy stakeholders, heritage site managers and economists concerns
means by which to account for the value and regimes of value in tourism,
especially with regard to intangible heritage, privately owned properties in
public places and sites that belong to the commons.
Themes and Topics
- How is value in tourism and travel
conceptualized, normalized and measured, according to different disciplines and
social actors (tourism and heritage planners, cultural policy makers, tourists,
local populations, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, geographers)?
-
What values are mobilized and experienced by tourists? To which emotional
cultures and morals do they pertain? What are the values inherent in concepts
like nature, god, world heritage, or humanity? How have they been historically
formed? What kinds of society do they reflect? What political projects and
which humanities do they articulate?
-
How is value produced in tourism and for tourists? How is this production of
value governed? Who owns such value? Who derives an economic or symbolic
remuneration of it? How are values and their remuneration regulated? What
systems of value accountancy and redistribution are in place? How tensions,
contradictions and controversies over values are constructed and negotiated
when touristic referents are invoked?
-
Why, and how (through which processes), are such regimes of value maintained?
What kind of social order and forms of participation do they reflect and help
to reproduce in the construction of tourism? How different actors construct and
cope with contradictions between value regimes? And how do they function as
devices for social inclusion and exclusion? What ethical claims do they imply,
and how do they translate these in social life?
Organisation
The conference takes place from 2 to 4 July 2012 in Sion, Switzerland (a
two hour ride from Geneva airport). It is jointly organised by the
Tourism-Contact-Culture Research Network (TOCOCU) and the Department of Tourism
Studies of the University Institute Kurt Bösch(IUKB). IUKB’s mission focuses on inter- and transdisciplinary approaches in
teaching and research. The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Tourism
(CRIT) is one of the programs, bringing together anthropological, sociological,
geographical, politological and economic approaches of tourism. TOCOCU was
created in 2009 as a means to bring together social scientists interested in
research on tourism. The first conference of the network, “Tourism and
Seductions of Difference,” organised in 2009 at New University of Lisbon in
Portugal attracted more than 200 international scholars and represented a major
milestone in the recent history of critical tourism research. This second
biannual event again aims to generate interdisciplinary debate about a specific
topic. As in previous TOCOCU events, the maxim of the conference is to be
accessible and to create spaces of exchange between academics. All abstracts
will be assessed by the scientific committee.
Call for Papers and Abstract Submission (deadline 15 March 2012)
The conference wishes to bring together academics from all social
sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology, geograpgy, economics, political
sciences, etc.), tourism and heritage policy, and the emerging fields of
heritage and environmental economics. The Call for Papers is open untill 15
March 2012. All abstracts will be reviewed individually by the members of the
academic board (based on a point system). Based on this review, a short list of
accepted abstracts will be created and communicated in early-mid April 2012. If
presentation slots become available at a later stage, late abstracts may be
accepted. The conference will initially accept a maximun of 150 papers.
To submit an abstract, please use the following link: Abstract Submissionat the
website of TOCOCU.
Opportunity to Organise Thematic Panels
We encourage scholars to organise thematic panels focusing on any aspect
of the conference theme. We would expect panel organisers to prepare and
constitute these panels well before the deadline for abstract submissions.
Panel organisers must make sure that all panel participants will submit
individual abstracts through the abstract submission system of the conference.
All abstracts, be they part of pre-arranged panels or not, will be reviewed
anonymously at the same time by the academic board of the conference. If some
or all abstracts of pre-arranged panels are not accepted, panel organisers will
be asked to reconfigure their panels by reducing their size or by including
papers that were submitted through the general Call for Papers. To constitute a
panel that fits in the organisation time frame of the conference, we advise
panel organisers to group sets of three papers (corresponding to 90 minutes in
the conference), with a maximum of 12 papers (corresponding to 4 90-minute
sessions) for each panel. Please drop us a line if you wish to organise a
panel.
Convenors
Mathis Stock , CRIT, University Institute Kurt Bösch, Switzerland
David Picard, CRIA, New University of Lisbon, Portugal
Scientific Committee (this may be further enlarged
at a later stage)
Simone Abram, CTCC/Leeds Met, Leeds, UK
Olivier Crevoisier, Univ. Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Christophe Clivaz, CRIT, IUKB, Sion, Switzerland
Saskia Cousin, IIAC-LAIOIS/EHESS, Paris, France
Michael di Giovine, Anthrop/Univ Chicago, Chicago, USA
Pamila Gupta, New York New School, NYC, USA
Naomi Leite, Anthrop/Univ Nebraska, Lincoln, USA
Kenneth Little, Anthrop/York Univ, Toronto, Canada
Stéphane Nahrath, CRIT, IUKB, Sion, Switzerland
David Picard, CRIA-UNL/FCSH, Lisbon, Portugal
Mike Robinson, Cultural Heritage, University of Birmingham, UK
Noel Salazar, CuMoRe/Leuven Univ, Leuven, Belgium
Valerio Simoni, Anthrop/Lisbon University Institute, Portugal
Lina Tegtmeyer, America Stud/Free Univ, Berlin, Germany
Mathis Stock, CRIT, IUKB, Sion, Switzerland
Laurent Tissot, Univ. Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Further information
[log in to unmask]
www.tourismcontactculture.org.uk
www.iukb.ch/index.php?id=11
Valerio Simoni, PhD.
- Post-Doctoral Researcher
Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA-IUL)
Lisbon, Portugal
- Visiting Research Associate
Centre for Tourism & Cultural
Change
Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
http://www.cria.org.pt/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=521%3Avalerio-simoni&catid=66%3Aequipa-principal-main-team-phd-only&Itemid=80&lang=pt
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