Sessions sponsored by the Recreation, Sport and Tourism (RTS) Specialty Group of the AAG: http://www.aagrts.org/aag.html

IGU-AAG collaborations 2022: 
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1. Session Trilogy - American Association of Geographers (AAG) 2022 meeting in New York:
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EEG: Anticipate - Adapt - Reconfigure? Current perspectives on Evolutionary Economic Geographies and Tourism Mobilities

Organisers:
Salvador Anton Clavé, Rovira i Virgili University salvador.anton@urv,cat
Julie Wilson, Open University of Catalonia UOC [email protected]
Antonio Paolo Russo, Rovira i Virgili University antonio.russo@urv.cat
Patrick Brouder, Vancouver Island University [email protected]

This special track of three interrelated sessions centres on current perspectives on evolutionary economic geographies and tourism mobilities in different socio-spatial and cultural contexts. The three sessions are co-sponsored by the International Geographical Union (IGU) Commission on Tourism, Leisure and Global Change and the Recreation, Tourism and Sport Specialty Group of the AAG. Sessions A and B are being organised under the banner of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities-funded project ADAPTOUR: The Adaptability of Complex Tourist Destinations in the Present Era of Social, Economic and Environmental Transformations: Innovative Paths Towards Destination Resilience while Session C is part of the EU Horizon2020 project SMARTDEST - Cities as mobility hubs: tackling social exclusion through ‘smart’ citizen engagement (both projects are led by the GRATET Research Group).

If you are interested in joining this trilogy of sessions, please register for the AAG and submit an abstract via the AAG system by October 18th, 2021, and send a copy of your abstract to the session organisers as soon as possible but not later than October 18th, 2021. Please note the AAG final submission deadline for all paper abstracts is October 19th, 2021.

Session A. Adaptability and innovative paths of complex tourism destinations moving towards destination resilience  ​

Chair: Professor Salvador Anton Clavé, GRATET Research Group: Rovira i Virgili University
 
This first session call aims to contextualise the evolution of tourism destinations within the broader vectors of interpretation of adaptability and resilience frameworks. Global dynamics and local transformations can increase the vulnerability of destinations and decrease their capacity to face potential crisis situations (Cheer & Lew, 2017). Key concepts provided by evolutionary economics geography (EEG), especially path dependence / creation, may increase our understanding of how destinations can anticipate, prepare for, respond to and recover from crises, creating a continually changing environment including reactive and proactive capacities that generate a continuous trade-off between stability and flexibility. As such, adaptability is a key process from an evolutionary perspective involving all destination stakeholders, underpinned by societal change. Such analysis requires conceptual and empirically complex, non-linear and non-deterministic models. This is most pertinent in the context of the economic lock-in that many complex destinations are facing, due to either internal processes of over-specialisation or external dynamics of social, economic and environmental transformation. Papers are invited that explore the adaptability and resilience of destinations from an evolutionary economic geographies (or related) perspective.

Session B. ‘Moments’ in the Geographical Political Economy of Tourism Destinations ​

Co-Chairs: Dr Julie Wilson, NOUTUR Research Group, Open University of Catalonia UOC and Patrick Brouder, Vancouver Island University

Local, regional and global economic linkages and flows of people and resources are shaping the rapid and unexpected spread of shocks and spontaneous ‘moments’ (Sanz, Wilson and Anton, 2017) that can in turn generate major impacts, disruption and a whole range of externalities within and beyond tourism destinations. Destinations’ recovery from disruptive global moments and subsequent reconfiguration processes stemming from local-level key transformations may vary according to specific socio-economic contexts in terms of the characteristics and form of prior ‘destinationscapes’. Co-evolutionary processes emerge in response, leading to a diverse range of path-shaping outcomes that can range from the reinforcing of existing paths, subtle shifts towards new, more plastic paths or the creation of entirely new paths. This second call for proposals aims to discuss the utility of the `moments’ approach in understanding destination evolution and to illustrate how the ‘moments’ concept may help both researchers and tourism industry professionals to learn from tourism transformation dynamics. This also connects the EEG tourism destinations related analysis with Cultural Political Economy (Ribera Fumaz, 2009; Sum & Jessop, 2013); Geographical Political Economy (Sheppard, 2010; MacKinnon et al, 2019); and socio-ecological resilience theories (Cottrell & Duke, 2016).

Session C. The reconfiguration of tourism mobilities systems and local footprints: social exclusion from an evolutionary perspective 

Chair: Professor Antonio Paolo Russo, GRATET Research Group: Rovira i Virgili University

Global tourism mobilities and the related flows of workers, capital and goods are a recognized constitutive agency of places, inducing complex dynamics in relation to ‘resident’ communities, in particular in urban contexts and historical cores therein (López Gay et al., 2020). Authors subscribing to the mobilities turn, such as Tim Cresswell, Kevin Hannam, and Katharina Manderscheid, have advanced the research agenda regarding the nature and effects of the multiple negotiations unfolding locally, bringing out a politics of mobilities which spans from the power to be mobile at the micro-scale of urban spaces, to the global implications of expanding leisure mobilities, as well as the relational implications of pandemic ‘immobilizations’ (Salazar, 2020). Yet the pathways of production of social inequality in tourism places is still a relatively under-researched topic (Sheller, 2021; Higgins-Desbiolles, vv.), interrogating for instance the very nature of labor, home, and citizenship. This third session call invites contributions that, using mobilities as epistemology and evolutionary economic geography as a conceptual canvas, provide innovative reflections and hard evidence as to the material, spatial, institutional, and discursive dimensions of the production of social injustice and exclusion in tourism places. 
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2. Panel session  co-sponsored by the International Geographical Union (IGU) Commission on Tourism, Leisure and Global Change and the AAG Recreation, Tourism and Sport (RTS) Specialty Group, in collaboration with Routledge /Taylor & Francis / CRC Press. POSTPONED UNTIL AAG DENVER, 2023
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Tourism Geographies: Reflections and Projections on a Decade of Change

This panel session 'Tourism Geographies: Reflections and Projections on a Decade of Change' marks two important occasions for the international community of scholars researching the geographies of tourism. On the one hand, 2022 marks the ten year anniversary of the publication of the 'Routledge Handbook of Tourism Geographies' (edited by Julie Wilson), presented back in 2012 in a lively and well attended panel session at the  AAG annual meeting in New York City. On the other hand, the panel celebrates the upcoming publication of the 'New Routledge Handbook of Tourism Geographies' a decade later; once again in New York City (and edited this time around by Julie Wilson and Dieter K. Müller). 

In the decade that has passed between these two state of the art analyses of tourism geographies scholarship, not only has the field evolved and diversified considerably in conceptual and methodological terms but tourism as praxis, process, industry and phenomenon has arguably also shifted enormously at the local, regional, national and global scales. These shifts and developments will be the focus of this panel session, which features the editors of the New Routledge Handbook of Tourism Geographies and a number of its contributing authors, several of whom also contributed to the first edition of the book. The panel will also examine the likely future evolution of tourism geographies scholarship in a post-pandemic context and beyond.

Participation in this panel session is by invitation of the organisers, given that panellists are contributing authors to the 'New Routledge Handbook of Tourism Geographies' (Routledge; forthcoming). 

However, beyond the panellists formally listed in the lineup, we would very much like to see a wide participation in the debate by scholars working on tourism geographies topics and such, we warmly invite you to join us in celebrating a decade of tourism geographies scholarship.

The session is provisionally scheduled to take place face-to-face during the AAG annual meeting in New York City, though we anticipate virtual participation also being an option.

Moderators; Julie Wilson / Dieter Müller

Panellists:
Katie Dudley
Patrick Brouder 
Theano S. Terkenli
Dimitri Ioannides
Antonio Paolo Russo
Meng Qu
Salvador Anton Clavé
Franz Buhr
Olga Hannonen