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WITH IN DANGEROUS TIMES
Call for Contributions
WITH is the subject of this phrase. With as being. Be with us for a week of conversations, creativity, listening, and contemplation about with in this dangerous time. Be with us for food, light, warmth, sea, wine, and … Be with us for passion, care, joy, knowledge, and love.
We hope together we can move beyond the idea of the binary separation between individuality and collectivity. We are singular plural. From the first beat of our existence we become, thanks to, and through, others. With is not a link between two different entities like you/me, self/other, home/away, host/guest. Instead, we are always already becoming in relation. Tourism, too, is always already relational. We gratefully accept the invitation of Adam Doering and Jundan (Jasmine) Zhang to reconsider what the emancipatory praxis and critical pedagogy common to critical tourism studies could become when we question “that the world comes into creation only when it is named, represented, and negotiated.”[1] Inspired by the philosophy of Jean Luc Nancy, they invite us to consider the world not as our human projection or construction, but as relation.
The Canadian folk singer Bruce Cockburn tells us the story of “Lovers in a Dangerous Time.”[2] Is there ever a non-dangerous time to be a lover? Our world is in collective trauma from the realization that our mingled breath can end one another’s life. Our touch can contaminate. Our world is racked by silent convulsions, as spaces of existence collapse, vacated by species unnoticed and ungrieved. Our human choices are making it a very dangerous time for everybody else. But even in the absence of a ravaging pandemic or an impending climate apocalypse, love is always a leap of faith. With is inevitable, is a gift, and is hard to live. There is no safe time to be a lover.
If the word is relation, if we are relation, and if relationality is not safe, then how to live? And how to love? What tourism is possible when tourism is being-with? How can relationality manifest in new ways? What do we do with its danger?
We do not have answers to these questions, but a conviction that “staying with the trouble”[3] demands of us a daily effort not to be captured by the allure of cynicism, relativism, or perpetual rage, but instead to seek those things which can serve as antidotes to loss of hope. We need to become reenchanted with the world, for enchantment feds care, purpose, and hope. Enchantment begins in attending to the singular specificity of the things of this world—in slowing down, looking closely, tasting, immersing, communing. Join us in Menorca this June, meet the species of this international UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, feel the sea on your toes, walk together with friends old and new, savour the tastes so unique to this special place. Menorca is an island with a long and complex history, known for its beauty, for its strong commitment to environmental sustainability, for the art of Mediterranean cuisine, for the pleasure and beauty of simple ingredients of land and sea, combined with a deep culinary tradition that yields products found nowhere else in the world. Our venue, the Lazaretto of Maò, is an architectural heritage site, which was built over two hundred years ago to treat contagious diseases in the Mediterranean. It is a space that combines culture, history, health, and now also tourism, as it has been renovated to serve as a conference venue.
CTS 9 will be an embodied conference. For the past two years, it has been impossible for most of us to meet across borders with the new and old friends of our academic community. Therefore, we aim to create a space to be together, not only to share our research, but to experience being and making sense with each other. Being-in-space matters for our thinking and our becoming. We want to pay homage to the with of breaking bread together. Eating- and cooking-with is an act of love which has in so many different ways been affected by the global pandemic. How much we have missed gathering together at the table with our loved ones! If you find yourself in a situation where unfortunately you cannot travel, then we have also created an opportunity for online participation and you can see all the information at the registration page.
We invite any contribution that reflects and imagines with in dangerous times. There is a seat at the table for contributions ranging from the traditionally intellectual to the innovative, artistic, and experiential. We welcome any submissions in English, French, or Spanish that fit under the broad umbrella of critical tourism studies or one of our cognate critical fields—critical hospitality studies, critical events studies, critical leisure studies, critical sport studies. In Menorca, we want to recover the joy and appreciation of the art of cultivating and receiving food from the earth, and of sharing it with one another, so we therefore invite you to share with us not just your knowledge of tourism, but also your favourite recipes. Please, send us these together with your abstracts. If a recipe has a special history for you, please share this as well.
We offer you words of inspiration—doors you may want to enter through in considering work to share at CTS 9, as together we (re)think being-in-common in tourism.
faith, love, joy, hope, enchantment, spirituality, co-existence, togetherness, relationality, justice, equity, freedom, kinship, responsibility, human, more-than-human, embodiment, time, place, journey, affect, playfulness, queering, creativity, imagination, consolation, compassion, emancipation, communion, inclusion, awe, healing, art, gift, solitude, contemplation, self, other, de-/post-colonialism, identity, diversity, difference, intersectionality, value, ethics, care, solidarity, sustainability, politics, history, philosophy, education, language, breath, water, food, land, sea, livelihoods, activism, stewardship, welfare, wellbeing, flourishing, digital, real, earth, home
Or create your own door to new imaginings of being with one another and the earth.
[1] Doering, A., & Zhang, J. J. (2018). Critical tourism studies and the world: Sense, praxis, and the politics of creation. Tourism Analysis, 23, 227–237.
[2] The Canadian rock band The Barenaked Ladies show us what it looks like in this particular dangerous time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DbChOUotfo
[3] Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Raleigh-Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Abstracts Due (extended): January 31, 2022 ● Notification of Acceptance: February 28, 2022
Optional Full Papers Due: April 1, 2022 ● Final Versions Due for Proceedings: May 15, 2022