Disenchanted travels: social and cultural meanings

The conference seeks to explore and deepen our understanding of tourism and literature relations by bringing together an international audience of academics, curators, writers, professionals and tourism managers to discuss this increasingly important field. The conference will be multi-disciplinary drawing from literary criticism, history, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, cultural and political geography, etc. I am personally interested in developing the discussion on 'perception' and 'cognition' that I feel needs to be further introduced in the field of tourism research and would welcome abstracts from neuro-scientists, philosophers, linguists, aestheticians and psycho-analysts. From a social anthropological perspective, I would like to continue the critical debate on the meaning of tourism as an international phenomena - a hypothetic form of 'sacrality' of the contemporary worlds - which a number of younger researchers refreshed through ethnographic approaches of tourists presented in last July's event. From a political economy and geography perspective, I think our last conference permitted a very fruitful discussion on the 'imagery' of places as a way to create familiarity, to 'know' the world through conventionalised compositions, an argument which bears important conceptual and political implications.