[URBANTH-L]CFP: Tourism and Performance: Scripts, Stages and Stories

[Angela Jancius]

Conference announcement and CFP 
 
Tourism and Performance: Scripts, Stages and Stories
14-18 July 2005, Sheffield, United Kingdom
 
Centre for Tourism & Cultural Change
Sheffield Hallam University
www.tourism-culture.com
 
CALL FOR PAPERS
This is the first announcement and call for papers for the 3rd CTCC Tourism Research Conference. Tourism and Performance: Scripts,
Stages and Stories is part of our ongoing conference series focusing on tourism and tourism related practices, with the aim to
test and, where useful, to overcome traditional conceptual and disciplinary boundaries. Previous events of this series include
Tourism and Photography: Still Visions - Changing Lives in Sheffield, in 2003, and Tourism and Literature: Travel, Imagination and
Myth in Harrogate, in 2004. 

Performance has been theorised as a way by which human beings act in society and organise their being in the world. In the context
of tourism, there is much debate regarding the idea of tourists as performers, 'acting out' spaces, and enacting 'scripts',
through which they organise and add meaning to their experiences and journeys. Tourism in this sense can be seen to be 'staged'.
But such perspectives raise a number of questions regarding the reflexivity, the hermeneutics, the sensual and aesthetic
modalities, the social interactions and the political economy of tourist performance: How is individual tourist performance linked
to socially prescribed or learnt models regarding tourism behaviour and spaces? How are spaces and material culture 'enacted' by
and for tourists?  What are the production and consumption modalities of in situ and in visu stages for tourism performance? How
is tourism performance linked to modes of touristic social interaction during the journey? What roles do stories play in
generating performativity and in liberating tourists from the acts of travel and tourism?
 
The aim of this conference is to explore such questions by drawing on the methodological and conceptual knowledge of different
disciplinary perspectives including those of: anthropology, sociology, history, folkloric studies, literature and critical theory,
linguistics, human/cultural geography, psychology, theatre studies and other relevant approaches.  Key themes of interest to the
conference include:
 
- Eden, Sodom & Gomorrah, the Golden Fleece: narrative archetypes underlying tourism?
- Hermeneutics and reflexivity: Tourism scripts, stages and stories as parables of the social world? 
- Losing the plot: Tourism lost in translation
- Odour, sound, vision, taste - making sense of the senses: cognitive categories and processes in tourism 
- Distance and familiarity: Tourist performance and social interaction
- Global forms and exchange: Building facades, eroticising space, making places visible for tourism
- Who is cooking who? Geographies and economies of touristic performance, consumption and exchange
- Political and symbolic manipulation of tourism scripts, stages and stories
- Objects as props - objects as texts
 
Please send a 300 word long abstract of your suggested communication with full address details as an electronic file to Dr. David
Picard (send to d.picard at shu.ac.uk ) as soon as possible but by 15th April 2005 at the latest. 
 
For further details on the conference and the Centre for Tourism & Cultural Change, please visit www.tourism-culture.com or
contact us at: CTCC, Sheffield Hallam University, Howard Street, Owen Building, Sheffield, S1 1WB, United Kingdom. Phone: +44 (0)
114 225 3973. Fax: +44 (0) 114 225 3343.
 

Dr David Picard 
Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change 
Sheffield Hallam University 
City Campus / Owen Building 
Howard Street 
Sheffield S1 1WB 
United Kingdom 
Phone +44 (0) 114 225 3973 
Fax +44 (0) 114 225 4434 
Email d.picard at shu.ac.uk 
Website www.tourism-culture.com