Emotion in Motion

The Passions of Tourism, Travel and Movement

Leeds, United Kingdom, 4-7 July 2009

This conference will address what we broadly identify as the passions and emotions induced by, or associated with, tourism, travel and movement. Tourism sets bodies in motion. It makes people move through unfamiliar grounds. It exposes them to exotic sensations, to the heat or cold of water, snow and sunshine, to odours, tastes, smells, colours, and forms that contrast with the aesthetics of their quotidian environments. It makes them leave their secure spaces of the familiar and exposes them, in secure doses, to the unfamiliar. It involves a transgression of the ordinary, an often ritualised temporary liquidification of moral and aesthetic rules that frame everyday life. The emotions of tourism, travel and movement, and the passions through which these are articulated, are hence directly linked to forms of motion. Motion disturbs the cognitive order of those in movement and challenges them to discover the familiar in the unfamiliar, to reconstruct and reconsider normality through the encounter of the extraordinary. It challenges them to repossess their bodies, to rethink the fundament of their being, to reassess the separations that configure the natures and identities of their belonging. Motion and the passions through which it is cultivated in fields of movement involves important psychological, economic, ethical and political issues. In many ways, motion creates its own frameworks of order and meaning. How does movement set emotions in motion? How do emotions work in travel and other movement based practices? How can different understandings of the concept of passion help to better understand such practices?  What are the social consequences?
 
This international and interdisciplinary conference is the 7th in an annual series initiated by the CTCC in 2003. It has become one of the leading international forums for critical tourism research and regularly attracts around 130 to 160 participants from different social sciences and humanities backgrounds. The 2009 edition is linked to, and will follow, the Royal Anthropological Institute’s 11th International Festival of Ethnographic Film which we host in Leeds (1-4 July 2009) and which provides an excellent introduction to some of its themes.

Themes of particular interest include:

  • Passions and Desires for Fluidity, Freedom, Friendship, Connection, Transhumance, Authenticity, Beauty
  • Passions and Flirts with Danger, Fear and Fantasy in Tourism and Travel
  • Passions and Transgressions: Eroticism, Liminality, Carnival, Violence and Power in Tourism and Travel
  • Passions and Joyful Sufferings: Epic Journeys, Mountain Liturgies and Touristic Activities that (may) Hurt
  • Passions and Stendhal Syndromes: Religious and Aesthetic Sublimation in Tourism, Pilgrimage and Travel
  • Passions and Consumptions: Pleasures and Symbolic Economies of Eating, Digesting, Excreting in Tourism
  • Passions and Morals in Tourism and Travel: Ambivalences of Encounter, Ethics, Moral and Legal Frames
  • Passions, Identity and the Making and Unmaking of ‘Passions’ in Culture and Social Performance
  • Economies and Politics of Passion in Tourism, Hospitality and Travel
To learn more about the conference please contact us at d.picard(at)leedsmet.ac.uk or visit www.tourism-culture.com and follow the link to 'conference and events', where you will also download a conference registration form.

Dr David Picard, Prof Mike Robinson, Dr Simone Abram

Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change
Leeds Metropolitan University
Old School Board 203 - Calverley Street
Leeds LS1 3ED - United Kingdom

About this Festival

Sponsored by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland (RAI) since 1985, it is an itinerant festival that moves biennially from one university host to another, in association with local community and cultural organisations.

The festival was held from Wednesday July 1st to Saturday July 4th 2009, and included over 50 hours of screenings of new films, a major international conference, and a targeted selection of events focusing on anthropological ethics in filmmaking, youth participatory film, and archiving ethnographic film.

Read more about the RAI 2009 festival

Our Sponsors

The Festival gratefully acknowledges sponsorship from: