After three years it is finally out thank you to Dr Emma Boocock and Dr Zoe Avner my co-editors, the series editors Stephen Wagg and Professor David Andrews and of course the team at Palgrave Macmillan.

This book is the first edited collection to offer an intersectional account of gender in mountaineering adventure sports and leisure. It provides original theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights into mountain spaces as sites of socio-cultural production and transformation.

The book shows how gender matters in the twenty-first century, and illustrates that there is a need for greater efforts to mainstream difference in representations and governance structures if we are to improve equality in adventure, sporting and leisure spaces.

The interdisciplinary volume represents scholars from theoretical as well as applied perspectives across adventure, tourism, sport science, sports coaching, psychology, geography, sociology and outdoor studies. 

Access it here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-29945-2#about-this-book

Great to work with Dr Emma Boocock, Northumbria University, on this paper for CABI’s Tourism Cases:

Summary
This case study examines an intersecting legacy of exclusion in the Welsh mountains, UK, and how this is challenged by Welsh women’s participation in outdoor adventure courses. The research critically appraised how Indigenous Welsh women1 navigate gender, class, and racial landscapes in mountain leisure to create inclusive spaces. Facilitated by a National Charitable Organization (NCO) that engages Indigenous Welsh communities in mountain adventure, we explored women’s embodied experiences through mobile video ethnography. Methodologically embodiment facilitated a way of capturing bodily sensations and experiences, which provided a language to express those ideas through reflexive analysis (Ellingson, 2017). The findings highlight how women embody cultural identity in the mountains, which contributes to understanding issues of exclusion/inclusion in adventure spaces.

The Value and Interest of the Case Study

Although the presence of women in mountain adventure is increasing recreationally and professionally, Welsh-speaking women who use their local outdoor spaces for leisure and career purposes are largely absent. This study explores how deep-rooted cultural assumptions associated with mountains and mountaineering produce exclusion, and how the involvement of Indigenous Welsh women in non-traditional adventure activities can create inclusive spaces of leisure.

Read it here http://Embodying Indigeneity in the Mountains: Creating Inclusive Adventure Spaces for Welsh Women, UK

So happy to have worked with the amazing Katrina Myrvang Brown at The James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen to create this paper that adds to the current debates concerning women and mountaineering just published in Annal of Tourism Research. The paper discusses how…

Gender is consequential in adventure tourism, where women are systemically underrepresented. Despite significant attention to the affective experiences of tourists, the gendered differences produced through affective experiences, and their implications for inclusivity in adventure activities and places, has been little explored. To address this, we examine the sensory and emotional politics of grading professional women mountaineers’ bodies, and its relationality with managing social and physical risk, through mobile video, interview and reflexive ethnography. We highlight the affective intensities of maintaining professional status, as regulated through prevailing masculine ideals, requiring women to perform significant emotional labour when working in high-risk environments by developing extreme strategies to alleviate stress. This elucidates how power-laden affective relations create and deny inclusion in adventure spaces.

You can access it here: Hall, J., & Brown, M., K. (2022) Creating feelings of inclusion in adventure tourism: Lessons from the gendered, sensory and affective politics of professional mountaineering. Annals of Tourism Research, 97, 103505. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2022.103505

Indigenous Feminist Gikendassowin (Knowledge) Decolonization through Physical Activity

Tricia McGuire-Adams shows us why stories matter by exploring how they are central to our understanding of ourselves and how we think and feel about each other. Through exploring the way settler colonialism causes ill health she advances how Indigenous Peoples can resist existing narratives and regenerate their health through processes of decolonisation. Decolonisation is meaningful and transformative resistance to the forces of colonialism that perpetuate the subjugation of minds, bodies and lands. She argues that rebuilding and restoring health can be achieved through Indigenous People reconnecting with ancestral knowledge and current stories of physical activity. She critiques settler-colonial stories that negatively portray Indigenous Peoples’ physical health and demonstrates how such narratives perpetuate inequality. By highlighting the way health disparity research documents the differences in health between non-Indigenous and Indigenous Peoples, she shows how this pathologizes Indigenous Peoples as ill. Moreover, by contrasting this with the way settler colonial notions of health are reified she exposes how Indigenous Peoples’ ancestral notions of health are subjugated. This has marginalising effects that disproportionately impacts Indigenous women by suppressing Indigenous Peoples’ cultural solutions to ill health. Through critical engagement with dibaajimowinan (stories founded in ancestral knowledge), McGuire-Adams theorises how narratives of the great physical strength and skill Indigenous People possessed through land-based activities such as fishing, trapping and hunting can have a decolonising effect. Focusing specifically on Indigenous women, she asks ‘Can physical activity that encompasses a decolonization approach be a catalyst for regenerative well-being for Anishinaabeg Women?’ (chapter 1).

McGuire-Adams highlights that before colonisation, Indigenous women had to be physically strong to survive, possessing significant strength and resilience as leaders, hunters and runners. She identifies that Indigenous women’s connection to the land is foundational to their cultural identity. McGuire-Adams shows how colonialism, genocide and forced removal of Indigenous Peoples from their lands continues to impact Indigenous Peoples’ health identities. By exploring how settler-colonial violence endures in social, political and economic structures, she exposes the devastating impact of enforced settler-colonial laws, and policies; that perpetuate a disconnect between Indigenous Peoples’ land-based dibaajimowinan and physical health. She demonstrates how this disconnect negatively impacts health through reduced participation and access to land-based physical activity, which continues to erase Indigenous Peoples from the land. She argues, that settler-colonial violence against Indigenous women is rooted in their inherent connection to the land and continued erasure. For example, Indigenous women continue to be systematically erased through gender-based violence where Indigenous women and girls are eight times more likely to die of homicide in Canada compared to non-indigenous women. As such, the impact of settler-colonial violence is embodied in intergenerational histories, past, present and future, where the erasure of Indigenous women’s bodies is internalised through trauma, grief, substance abuse and thus, ill-health.

McGuire Adams advances Indigenous feminist theory through creating space where Indigenous women can engage with their dibaajimowinan to explore how settler colonialism is embodied. She shows how through dibaajimowinan Indigenous women’s bodies can have dual representations of strength and resilience and settler-colonial erasure. As an Indigenous Anishinaabeg woman from Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada and an Indigenous feminist scholar, McGuire-Adams aimed to understand how Indigenous women resisted and actively decolonised Western perceptions of health through participation in physical activity. To achieve this, she makes a key contribution to Indigenous feminist research through the innovative design of an Anishinaabeg research paradigm that centres on Anishinaabeg knowledge or gikendaasowin. Central to the Anishinaabeg research paradigm is the ‘Anishinaabeg way of being’ that ‘signal the use of culture, teachings and ceremony in research’ and involves story collection rather than data collection to address the central problems of research (Chapter, 2, p. 21). Three different methods of story collection were developed to capture key insights from Elders through a sharing circle, guided storytelling with Anishinabekweg Indigenous running groups and physical engagement in exercise followed by storytelling (Wiisokotaatiwin) with urban-based Indigenous women.

Major findings centred on how Indigenous women use physical activity as a form of regeneration and personal decolonisation. McGuire-Adams identifies how the connection between culture and physical activity is profoundly influenced by ancestral physicality and how this is regenerative of spiritual connections to the land. She explains that ‘mindfully engaging in revitalising the physical strength of our ancestors in our own bodies and connecting with memories of the physicality of our Anishinabekwe ancestors, Anishinaabeg are inspired to seek physical strength via physical activity and to re-engage in Anishinaabeg ethic of self-discipline’ (Chapter 3, p. 58). The research showed the importance of connecting to ancestral physicality through the Mitchitweg who, historically were highly respected Anishinaabeg messengers that ran between communities. She identified that a contemporary group of Mitchitweg female runners, called Kwe Pack, chose to run on ancestral trails enabling them to connect to the vitality, histories, language, and cultural landscapes of their ancestors. For the Kwe Pack running is a form of ceremony, healing and a way of inspiring others to achieve personal well-being. Importantly running created the opportunity to provide good role models for their children, family and community. McGuire-Adams theorises that this acts as a decolonising force that actively resists notions of victimage and re-presences the Anishinaabeg on the land. Moreover, the Kwe Pack demonstrate a counter-narrative to the deficit-based literature by showing the regenerative impact of physical activity guided by ancestral physicality.

McGuire-Adams calls for Indigenous health research that has traditionally used a deficit-based approach when analysing the ill health of Indigenous Peoples to shift to a strength-based perspective that focuses on what is working well for Indigenous People (Chapter. 5, pp. 91–92). She demonstrates the regenerative power of engaging in physical activity and how it acts as a bridge between the past and present to decolonise narratives of health. In sum, this book will appeal to scholars, postgraduate students and public authorities. It provides new theoretical and methodological approaches to decolonise physical activity and presents unique opportunities to leverage social change for Indigenous Peoples and particularly Indigenous women.

Hall, J. (2021) Indigenous Feminist Gikendassowin (Knowledge) Decolonization through Physical Activity. Review of Indigenous Feminist Gikendassowin (Knowledge) Decolonization through Physical Activity by Tricia McGuire-Adams, Leisure Studies doi-org.yorksj.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/02614367.2021.1962394 .

Transforming Sport and Physical Cultures Through Feminist Knowledges. Review of Transforming Sport and Physical Cultures Through Feminist Knowledges

Transforming Sport and Physical Cultures Through Feminist Knowledges draws on cutting-edge research to inspire readers to think through how physical experiences and embodied movement in sport and leisure are gendered in the twenty-first century. This edited volume begins to consolidate the emergent field of Feminist Physical Cultural Studies (FPCS) and in doing so extends knowledge in the broader canon of physical cultural studies. It does so through applying feminist new materialist approaches within a social justice agenda to understand how gender politics and relations are produced and negotiated in physical culture. Feminist new materialism offers a rich approach for exploring posthuman or more-than-human relations, in what Pink (2009) refers to as an emplaced mind-body-environment where gender is conceived as spatial, diverse, vital and fluid. Feminist new materialist approaches aim to extend beyond essentialist fixed binaries (male/female) and biological determinism to understand how gender is embodied, exposing inequalities, as well as how it can be transformative. The book makes an important contribution to PCS by broadening our understanding of how power, identity and difference are gendered in leisure and physical activity and how feminist knowledges can lead to social change. The volume encompasses a wide milieu of perspectives to question the scope and scale of mobile bodies that attempt to understand how leisure and sporting practices can be i) a force for resistance, contestation and transformation; ii) how gender is embodied, relational and politicised and iii) how addressing inequalities can lead to shifting power relations and offer routes to activism and inclusion. Gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality and dis(ableism) are expressed through a range of power geometries within the leisure and sporting genres of netball, football, cycling, and pregnant physical bodies. A key theme centres on decolonial and postcolonial intersectional approaches for understanding how ethnic and racial physical cultural practices and experiences embody colonial histories that privilege white bodies. Brice and Andrews (Chapter 8) explore how race is erased through postfeminist neoliberal consumption of institutionalised messages of white middle-class female empowerment championed by major sporting organisations. They show how the 2015 U.S. Soccer Federation SheBelieves Campaign undermines women’s power to resist sexism through postfeminist beliefs that place the onus on the individual (woman) to overcome hardships and barriers (Brice & Andrews, Chapter 8). Although Oxford and Spaaij (Chapter 4) demonstrate how young Colombian women and girls’ participation in football is challenging the definition of what is socially acceptable in leisure and sporting pursuits. They show how coloniality of gender is imbued with diverse oppressions, configured in global, as well as local power structures, that privilege boys and call for spaces where women and girls are not subject to masculine-oriented structures. In contrast, Thorpe and Marfell’s (Chapter, 2) ethnographic research involved adopting and recognising the importance of Indigenous People’s knowledge, ways of thinking, values, attitudes, language, and social life; through co-producing an immersive Kaupapa Māori approach to researching netball in New Zealand. Their study highlights the significance of netball for strengthening Māori tribal connections and how this helps to celebrate and revitalise cultural traditions, providing hopeful signs for FPCS new materialist research. Importantly the book explores how immersive methodological autoethnographic and ethnographic approaches offered an opportunity to operationalise ways to investigate the material relationality between gendered objects and humans. Ray’s (Chapter 6) autoethnographic account of participating in the Australian Football League (AFL) shows how relations between bodies, actions and discourse are complex, fluid and diverse. He demonstrates how masculinities become privileged and are ‘written into existence via the relations which occur between bodies and objects.’ Similarly, Barrie, Waitt and Brennan-Horley (Chapter 7) consider the technologically mediated world of road cycling in Australia to understand the affective dimensions of self-tracking and data surveillance through the cycling application Strava. In doing so, Strava is explored as a site of excess producing a range of emotions including shame, anger, pride and pleasure. Importantly spatial boundaries are shown to be expanded beyond the personal becoming the property of global communities that act to configure femininities and masculinities in new ways. For example, through ‘broadcasting your ride, you broadcast your body to be judged’ that, in some instances, led to the reproduction of masculine cultures of speed, risk and bullying. In contrast, to alleviate these power dynamics and politics, participants actively avoided using data recording technologies to preserve a sense of wellbeing and self-care. Finally, the volume also offers key philosophical insights concerning the postgenomic turn and a move away from genetic determinism. Jette, Esmode and Maier (Chapter, 3) theorise how material social, economic, political inequities and stressors can contribute to the health outcomes of unborn foetuses. They challenge how to change theory research in public health risks missing how key factors, produced through social, economic and environmental inequalities, can literally get ‘under the skin’ and contribute to obesity in the mother and child. They go on to argue that this is not necessarily a failing of individual mothers but of institutionalised (often unachievable) social pressures that place the onus on mothers to create healthy environments for their children. Similarly, Coffey (Chapter, 5) theorises how feminist new materialist approaches problematise normative truths about how bodies are constituted. Her analysis considers the impact that socio-normative messages concerning bodily appearance ideals can have through, for example, the practices of dieting. She explores how over a life-course, embodied experiences of bodily appearance change because of personal relationships, increased knowledge and changing leisure activities, which can open up new possibilities. Taking an interdisciplinary approach this book begins to ground conceptual approaches to Feminist New Materialism through, for example, posthumanist, affective, more-than-human, assemblage and interpellation theories. These theoretical explorations provide openings for designing experimental methodologies and ethnographies that provide practical methods for gathering and interpreting empirical embodied data; thoughtfully weaving a breadth of theory with rich case studies and academic concerns with how gender becomes embodied. This volume begins to offer a framework for academics and postgraduate students to critically think through the gendered body in PCS. Importantly, it advances the emerging discipline of FPCS and signals the need to consider issues of gender, social justice and change in the realm of leisure and sport. Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: SAGE.

Hall, J. (2022) Transforming Sport and Physical Cultures Through Feminist Knowledges. Review of Transforming Sport and Physical Cultures Through Feminist Knowledges by Simone Fullagar, Emma Rich, Adele Pavlidis and Cathy van Ingen, Leisure Studies https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2022.2037152

So pleased to be accepted to be part of this special issue with Dr Brendan Paddision

Thank you to the editors Raymond Rastegar, Freya Higgins Desbiolles and Lisa Ruhanen.

We hope to see this in print in early August 2022

Tourism policy, spatial justice and COVID-19: Lessons from a tourist-historic city

In many historic and post-industrial cities, tourism is often positioned as an important component of urban regeneration. Yet, the promise of sustainability and social transformation are often empty as policymakers concentrate on sustaining tourism over supporting greater social, economic, and environmental sustainability. Furthermore, the pandemic has drawn attention to the unsustainable nature of the neoliberal model of tourism engagement. Due to the paucity of research exploring spatial injustice in urban tourism, this study examines the impact policymaking and governance structures have on urban destinations and the inequalities this creates. Drawing on Edward Soja’s approach to Lefebvre’s The Right to the City (1968), this research explores how lessons learnt during the pandemic in the tourist-historic city of York, UK, could transform tourism in historic urban spaces. Taking an interpretive case study approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with leading stakeholders to understand the spatial dimensions of the lived experience of policymaking. The hopeful signs emerging from York’s response to the pandemic demonstrates how communities can reclaim voice to build sustainable and purposeful models of engagement. This paper contributes to our understanding by demonstrating the transforming potential that future policymaking could have for reducing the negative impacts of tourism.

Paddison, B., & Hall, J. (2022). Tourism policy, spatial justice and COVID-19: Lessons from a tourist-historic city. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2022.2095391

Excited to be invited to be part of the AHRC research network and present at the Royal Geographical Society – Other Everests: Commemoration, Memory and Meaning and the British Everest Expedition Centenaries, 2021-2024. The network will host a series of events and exhibitions over the next 12 months.

I will be presenting within the Globalization on Everest panel discussion with Dr Paul Gilchrist, Jase Wilson and Dr Nathan Smith, my contribution centres on:

GENDERED EXPERIENCES OF PROFESSIONAL FEMALE MOUNTAINEERS: JUNKO TABEI MOUNTAINEERING HERO?

In response to this symposium my contribution centres on the psychological, cultural and nationalistic imperatives that drive the commodification of Everest, with particular focus on the inequalities produced through the enduring appeal of adventurous white masculinities. 

Recently I have been researching how gender and race intersect in spaces of risk and the factors that limit access to social and material mountain spaces, focusing on the experiences of Junko Tabei, the first woman to ascend Everest in 1975.

To understand her experiences, it is important to consider how:

1. Governance structures in mountaineering codify and grade mountaineering spaces and produce/reproduce extreme spaces of risk that have become increasingly commodified – to understand how:
2. These structural processes impact mountaineering identities at the intersection of gender and race

Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City: An Ethnography
By: Thomas Raymen
Bingley: Emerald 3019 (Emerald Studies in Deviant Leisure)
ISBN 978-1-78743-812-5

Putting parkour in perspective

Thomas Raymen challenges us to consider how consumer capitalism sits at the heart of even our most transgressive counter-cultural sports and urban leisure activities. The objective of his book is to provide insight into the spatial dynamics of parkour’s practice in the city, but also into the role of parkour in the wider lives of traceurs (parkour athletes) to explain the complex position it holds at the nexus between spatially illegitimate ‘deviance’ and ‘legitimate’ commodified leisure. Raymen asks why parkour is excluded from urban spaces despite conforming to consumer-capitalist commodification through the development of consumer goods, such as fee-paying parkour air-gyms, use in advertising campaigns, television programmes, films, and associated merchandise. The volume makes an important contribution to criminology and leisure to trouble the widely held perception that leisure is good (Rojek, 2010). Raymen brings into view how harm is hidden in the things we seek and love the most in our contemporary consumer leisure cultures.

Through an Ultra-Realist lens founded in transcendentalism and Lacanian philosophy, Raymen theorises how individuals, even though they engage in seemingly transgressive behaviours, lack autonomy and the ability to resist hegemonic oppression. Taking a broad perspective, he shows how contemporary life is embedded in neoliberal consumer capitalism, which places primacy upon identity, entrepreneurialism, risk-taking and ‘cool individualism’. Individualism drives the desire to meet an unattainable ideal (in this case the heroic, brave and strong athlete) that sits at the heart of consumerism, represented through media, from fashion, films to social media, and that leads to a sense of lack and dissatisfaction producing significant emotional labour. Moreover, Raymen challenges the assumption that parkour is a form of political dissent, ‘rebellion’ or anti-capitalist ‘resistance’ popularised within academia and popular culture but is in fact a form of hyper-conformity’ (Chapter 3). This is illustrated by the traceur’s emphatic denial that parkour is a form of social-resistance as well as their entrepreneurial activity that commodifies leisure into gig-work.

The precariousness of post-industrial labour markets and the blurring of work and leisure provide a broad angle for a critical discussion about parkour.

To operationalise theory, Raymen undertook longitudinal ethnographic research in the post-industrial city of Newcastle, United Kingdom, that enabled him to ‘feel’ parkour in an embodied sense as a co-participant living and breathing the life of a traceur. This also enabled him to observe the research participants’ interactions with spaces and people within and those outside of the sport, revealing sensory spatial dynamics as well as spoken lines of enquiry that otherwise would not have emerged. Importantly, by embodying parkour through experiencing the flows of the city, Raymen identifies three key factors: firstly, the tacit dimensions of negotiating sensations of spatial legitimacy and illegitimacy, through performing in physical urban spaces. Raymen exposes how inequality and exclusion are the product of the shift from municipal socialism to municipal capitalism and the transition from democratic municipal governance to pursuing consumer markets. He explores how the processes of regenerating deindustrialising cities into commercial spaces of consumption to make cities economically viable lead to privatisation and securitisation of urban space (Zukin, 1995). Furthermore, capitalism’s use of culture displaces it through the visual display of the city to create a ‘wider symbolic economy’, which provides the multi-sensory spatial ambience conducive to consumption (Chapter 5). Maintaining the experiential atmosphere of space itself is imperative to the city’s economic success, anything that deviates or threatens it is excluded. This was illustrated by traceurs constantly being moved on by security guards from ‘public’ urban spaces even though they were not breaking any formal laws.

Secondly, the role of living the parkour lifestyle is contextualised through exploring the pressures and realities of the lived experience of twenty-first-century capitalism that fixes young people in precarious working conditions in the service economy. The precarity of working life meant that it was hard to make the transition into adulthood, thus infantilising the traceurs because they were unable to secure a living wage and move from the familial home. Raymen points out the contradictory nature of the traceurs’ lives, showing how parkour was originally a form of childish urban-play, that has been ‘adultified’, increasingly professionalised, and commodified – in contrast to the infantilisation of ‘work’ and adulthood that demonstrates the existential insecurity of hyper-exploitative labour markets and the kind of emotional labour young people experience. As Raymen argues, this is a socio-historic moment revealing modern society’s obsession with youth and its socio-economic value.

Thirdly, this led to nuanced understandings of how parkour is a crucial form of identity work that helped to negate sensations of hopelessness and achieve a sense of purpose and wellbeing. Paradoxically, traceurs become prosumers by commodifying parkour practices, whereby leisure becomes work-like in what Stebbins (2007) conceptualised as ‘serious leisure’. By embedding the entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism within the practice of parkour, the traceurs are also offered liberalism’s fabled rewards of autonomy and ‘freedom’ (Chapter 4). The precariousness of post-industrial labour markets and the blurring of work and leisure provide a broad angle for a critical discussion about parkour. Raymen argues that this wider context has been neglected, but it is critical for understanding the attraction to parkour within the global and structural context of socio-economic change. This is contrasted with the spatial realm of parkour that Raymen acknowledges is far more complex by offering authentic, therapeutic and ‘Real’ experiences for the participants. Yet, by drawing on non-representational theory Raymen shows how traceurs embody the physical materiality of the city as an affective space of consumption through their enjoyment of creating images and videos in off-limits spaces; images and representations that would latterly be commodified for others’ consumption.

Thoughtfully weaving a breadth of theory with rich ethnographic research, the book offers a comprehensive analysis for academics and students across the social sciences of the harm leisure produces. Raymen works to answer the questions concerning the paradoxical contradictions of parkour’s position at the nexus between ‘deviance’ and ‘leisure’, asking why this group of people who were actively excluded from urban spaces due to capitalism’s hegemonic control of central city areas, perpetuate and participate in the economic system that marginalises them (Chapter 4). However, it is acknowledged that further work is to be done to explore how hyper-consumption, leisure and gender intersect and how masculinities shape urban spaces of leisure and harm. The book offers insight into the complexity of the integrated relationships between deviance, conformity and the transgression of spatial rules in late capitalist cities and consumer culture.

Copyright © Jenny Hall 2022

References

Rojek, C. (2010). The Labour of Leisure: The Culture of Free Time. London, Sage.

Stebbins, R. (2007). Serious Leisure: A Perspective of Our Time. London: Transaction Publishers.

Zukin, S. (1995). The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Royal Geographical Society with IBG International Conference 2022: Geographies Beyond Recovery

30 August – 2^nd September, Newcastle University, United Kingdom

CFP: Beyond Recovery: Sustainable Urban Tourism

Dr Brendan Paddison, York St John University

Dr Jenny Hall, York St John University

In many post-industrial cities, tourism has become the panacea for renewal and urban regeneration, widely considered the saviour of business economies and an instrument for poverty reduction. Yet, the promise of sustainability and social transformation are often empty as policymakers have concentrated on sustaining tourism over supporting greater social, economic and environmental sustainability (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2020). Overtourism, the climate crisis, the availability and quality of tourism work, and concerns regarding the capacity of communities to absorb tourism continue to highlight the unsustainable nature of the current industrial models of tourism. In addition, the pandemic has intensified social and economic inequalities (Jamal & Higham, 2021) and heightened issues of urban vulnerability (Sharifi & Khavarian-Garmsir, 2020), particularly for those destinations where tourism and hospitality have a major economic role.

It is within this context that this session explores the spatial in(justice) public policymaking and governance structures have on the ecology of urban tourist destinations and the inequalities this creates. As urban destinations emerge from the pandemic, striving to achieve a balance between development and sustainability is at the forefront of tourism debates (Rastegar, Higgins-Desboilles & Ruhenan, 2021). If concerns regarding the economic, social, cultural and environmental impacts of tourism are to be addressed, the unlocking of the industry is an opportunity to think radically about how tourism policy can be reimagined for a just tourism future. We invite contributors to critically and radically reimagine policymaking in city destinations through the lens of social justice and the transforming potential it holds for reducing the impacts of tourism.

This session aims to traverse disciplinary boundaries and welcomes contributions from all fields, which may relate, but are not limited, to the following themes:

• Geographies of harm in tourism cities 
• Mobilities and spatial politics of urban travel   
• Representations of difference in city destinations 
• Development discourses in urban tourism 
• Sustainable engagement with communities in tourism cities 

• Reflexive and critical modes of tourism practice in cities 
• Urban governance structures and the role of the private sector in urban destinations 
• Spatial justice and policymaking in urban destinations 
• Urban regeneration and tourism 

Please send abstracts (approx. 300 words) with author contact details to Dr Brendan Paddison (b.paddison@yorksj.ac.uk) & Dr Jenny Hall (j.hall@yorksj.ac.uk) by midnight Wednesday 23rd March 2022.

We hope to host the session as a hybrid model of live in-person and live online.

References

Higgins-Desbiolles, F. (2020). Socialising tourism for social and ecological justice after COVID-19. Tourism Geographies, 22(3), 610–623. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2020.1757748

Jamal, T., & Higham, J. (2020). Justice and ethics: towards a new platform for tourism

and sustainability. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 29(2–3), 143–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2020.1835933

Rastegar, R., Higgins-Desbiolles, F., & Ruhanen, L. (2021). COVID-19 and a justice framework to guide tourism recovery. Annals of Tourism Research, 103161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2021.103161

Sharifi, A., & Khavarian-Garmsir, A. R. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic: Impacts on cities and major lessons for urban planning, design, and management. Science of The Total Environment, 749, 142391. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.142391