Call for Contributions
​
IMPORTANT DATES
Abstracts Due: February 3, 2025
Notification of Acceptance: March 1, 2025
Optional Full or Working Papers Due: April 1, 2025
Final Versions Due for Proceedings: May 15, 2025
SUBMIT HERE:
https://publishing.bceln.ca/index.php/cts-proceedings/about/submissions​​
TOURISM AS… (CRITICALITY AS…)
What is ontology? It’s often conceived, in a limited way, as some sort of fundamental arrangement of the universe’s furniture (Veijola, Germann Molz, Phyytinen, Hockert, and Grit, 2014), bolted in place and conditioning the options for the creatures who dance among it. But what if, following Veijola and colleagues, we instead imagine ontology as an open set of possibilities: as an invitation to imagine how things are and might become. What if the universe is not given to us but is an unfolding production of co-play among the things and beings who find ourselves here.
Nietzsche famously declared all language to be dead metaphor. An antifoundational thinker, he rejected universal standards for truth claims and instead imagined knowledge production as the assertion of different—motivated—metaphorical statements about the world. Knowledge for him was “a linguistic process—a complex negotiated communicative project, containing a multitude of paradigmatic, historical, methodological, and disciplinary influences—in which scholars from different backgrounds engage together” (Belhassen and Caton, 2009, p. 337). Nietzsche was often a jerk to his fellow humans. To him, metaphors didn’t carry any relational moral weight; they were simply truth claims advanced by individuals in pursuit of their own most vital lived experience (Ferry, 2011). But metaphors are more than just building blocks for epistemic self-assertion and personal triumph; they can help us do better at living with one another (Grimwood, 2014). A good metaphor lets us arrange the furniture in a new way. Metaphors “actively shape worlds, socializing people into particular expectations about reality (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), in which particular values and courses of action make sense” (Stinson, Grimwood, and Caton, 2021, p. 237).
In the spirit of one of our founding CTS parents—now our guardian critical angel—Keith Hollinshead, we will engage our ontological imaginations as we gather for our 10th international meeting this summer. Keith would never have us forget that tourism makes worlds (Hollinshead, 2007). Worldmaking is creative and collaborative, imaginative and materially practiced. It asserts, naturalizes, normalizes, essentializes, elides, and overwrites; it also challenges, interrogates, complexifies, emphasizes, and celebrates. Worldmaking in tourism is a complex process. It is multi-agentive, involving the creative, imaginative, and physical labor of the media, governments, scholars, tourism brokers of all kinds, toured populations, and tourists themselves. The fruits of its labor are both collectively (or disjointedly) produced ideologies/mythologies/imaginaries of peoples/cultures/spaces (which can be held by groups about others, by groups about themselves, or both) and material outcomes, such as changes to the built environment, changes in human behaviors and practices, changes in resource levels and distributions, and changes in life chances in terms of what real creatures are actually able to do and to be. It takes into account the interactions of the diverse agents, structures, ideologies, and material conditions that make up our tourism world, and the larger world beyond it, of which the sphere of tourism is such a powerful part (Caton, 2013). Worldmaking is a wonderfully holistic concept. And ontological imagination—as given breath through metaphor—is at its root.
​
Gathering on the CTS network’s 20th anniversary offers us a chance to celebrate the transformative work of the critical tourism community. CTS has always imagined criticality as a big tent. The intrepid scholars who established and attended the first conference in Dubrovnik in 2005 to create the Academy of Hope in tourism inquiry—and those who have joined the network since—were, in equal measure, seeking the potential of tourism education, scholarship, and practice to promote positive social change and yearning to create a space of community for tourism scholars who often felt like lone wolves in departmental cultures dominated by pro-growth industry discourses (Ateljevic, Pritchard, and Morgan, 2007). They were pro-justice scholars seeking forms of tourism that serve local communities (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2006; Minnaert, Maitland, and Miller, 2013). They were skeptics of capitalism looking to question the social construction of tourism as nothing more than an industry (Lapointe and Coulter, 2020). Criticality meant activism, organizing, and social change, and these scholars have made a difference on the ground in the lives of communities. Some were also philosophers and psychoanalysts and humanities scholars in departments where most colleagues valued business or postpositivist social science approaches. Criticality meant fighting for new ways of knowing the world, and these scholars have seeded important conversations about epistemology and pedagogy that enlarge the space for what is possible in terms of approaches to research, teaching, and public engagement in tourism.
Today, CTS continues to bring together early career scholars, graduate students, and more established critical scholars who explore what tourism thought and practice can be and become, amidst post-pandemic tourism growth, overtourism, escalating ecological crisis, degrowth activism, and anti-tourism protest. Gathering on the island of Majorca, where many of these issues intersect and are held in tension, invites us to reflect on what it means to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016; Ren, 2021) with the places and beings we engage as critical tourism scholars. We will join around questions like
→ What does it mean for tourism to be culturally, economically, and environmentally affirming?
→ How does ontological imagining—worldmaking—matter?
→ What does it mean to be a critical scholar?
→ How does criticality matter?
→ How do alternative imaginaries of ‘tourism as...’ shape and intervene in tourism relations and subjectivities? How might they influence placemaking? And how might they engage with the (dis)continuities of ruination, degradation, resistance, resilience, and activism?
→ In what ways might hope shape our entanglements with the nature-cultures around us?
CTS X welcomes contributions ranging from the traditionally intellectual to the innovative, artistic, and experiential. We welcome 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, and critical sports studies. In Majorca, we want to reclaim possibilities of hope among the critical, affective, and affirming worldmaking inspirations of our communities, and to share these possibilities with one another. We invite you to share with us not just your conference abstract but also a favorite poem that represents an important tourism metaphor for you. Please, send us your poem together with your abstract. If your poem has a special history for you, please share this as well. You are welcome to send an image to accompany your poem. We will compile a CTS poetry book to commemorate our 20th anniversary.
​​
​
REFERENCES
​
Atelejevic, I., Pritchard, A. and Morgan, N. (2007). Editors’ introduction: Promoting an academy of hope in tourism enquiry. In I. Ateljevic, A. Pritchard, and N. Morgan (eds.), The Critical Turn in Tourism Studies: Innovative Research Methodologies (pp. 1–11). Elsevier.
Belhassen, Y., and Caton, K. (2009). Advancing understandings: A linguistic approach to tourism epistemology. Annals of Tourism Research, 36, 335–352.
Ferry, L. (2011). A brief history of thought: A philosophical guide to living. Harper Perennial.
Grimwood, B. (2015). Advancing tourism’s moral morphology: Relational metaphors for just and sustainable arctic tourism. Tourist Studies, 15(1), 3–26.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Higgins-Desbiolles, F. (2006). More than an “industry”: The forgotten power of tourism as a social force. Tourism Management, 27(6), 1192–1208.
Hollinshead, K. (2007).‘Worldmaking’ and the transformation of place and culture: The enlargement of Meethan's analysis of tourism and global change. In I. Ateljevic, A. Pritchard, and N. Morgan (eds.), The Critical Turn in Tourism Studies: Innovative Research Methodologies (pp. 1–11). Elsevier.
Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. The University of Chicago Press.
Lapointe, D., & Coulter, M. (2020). Place, labor, and (im)mobilities: Tourism and biopolitics. Tourism, Culture, and Communication, 20(2–3), 95–105.
Minnaert, L., Maitland, R., and Miller, G. (2013). Social tourism: Perspectives and potential. Routledge.
Ren, C. (2021). (Staying with) the trouble with tourism and travel theory? Tourist Studies, 21(1), 133–140.
Stinson, M., Grimwood, B., and Caton, K. (2021). Becoming common plantain: Metaphor, settler responsibility, and decolonizing tourism. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 29(2–3), 234–252.
Veijola, S., Germann Molz, J., Phyytinen, O., Höckert, E., and Grit, A. (2014). Disruptive tourism and its untidy guests: Alternative ontologies for future hospitalities. Palgrave Macmillan.