2024 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers
The AAG will be held in Honolulu, Hawai’i from April 16-20, 2024. The AAG is accepting registration for both in-person and virtual participation. The paper abstract submission deadline is November 16, 2023. Additional deadlines are listed below and on the AAG Website.
AAG Call for Papers & Sponsorship
If you would like RTS to sponsor your tourism geographies-related panel session and advertise your proposed panel on the AAG-RTS website (see below), please send the co-chairs (Jennie Germann Molz - jmolz@holycross.edu and Joseph Cheer - J.Cheer@westernsydney.edu.au) an email with your title and panel abstract and include "AAG-RTS Sponsorship" in the subject line. We look forward to including your panels in the RTS lineup!
RTS Social
We are planning to host a social event for RTS members who will be attending the 2024 AAG! If anyone is from the Honolulu area and/or is interested in helping plan the event, please email Jennie and Joseph about joining the RTS social committee to plan the event.
Preparing for the Honolulu 2024 Annual Meeting
Finally, the AAG is piloting an approach to better connect the conference to the place where it is held. This includes hosting a virtual learning series between July and March with webinars featuring Hawaiian speakers and perspectives on a range of issues. You can find more information and register for these webinars on the AAG website.
AAG DEADLINES
Sponsored Panel Sessions:
AI and Big Data in Tourism and Hospitality: social media, spatially distributed data and data mining
Andrei Kirilenko (University of Florida)
Based on successful Tourism Analytics sessions held at AAG from 2018, we are inviting oral presentations on data intensive and spatial analysis in tourism with particular interest in data mining, text mining, image recognition, user-generated content, GIS analysis and similar application outlined in Description section. This session is targeting innovative advanced data intensive research in tourism with the goal of exchanging ideas, new approaches, and potential collaborations. Please e-mail paper titles and abstracts to session organizers Andrei Kirilenko (Andrei.Kirilenko@ufl.edu) prior to the deadline. Abstracts may not exceed 250 words.
The data revolution, which started during the past decade, brought new possibilities for decision making and innovation based on the novel methods of analysis of (typically) vary large sets of data. Tourism Analytics is a new area in tourism research and education. Evidentially, the field is highly fragmented, the methods to analyze data are not firmly set, are still evolving and very fluid. However, the following common key areas, and methods emerge:
Tourism Today
Svetlana Stepchenkova (University of Florida)
This is a fully online session organized by Svetlana Stepchenkova (svetlana.step@ufl.edu). Abstracts should be 250-300 words. The format of the Tourism Today session is Virtual Lightning Paper. The lightning paper session is a larger group of short presentations summarizing research or studies in process in a particular field. It provides the audience with a rapid and intensive overview of research and allows for more in-depth discussion between presenters and the audience. More details on this format are available here.
This section is geared toward tourism, recreation, hospitality, and events researchers. It is especially beneficial for doctoral and master students who want to share their work, obtain feedback, and practice presentation skills in a time-limited format. In-progress, early-results, and completed studies are welcome! The section accepts a wide variety of studies that deal with issues that tourism faces today, including but not limited to:
Tourism, resilience and wellbeing
Regina Scheyvens (Massey University) & Apisalome Movono (Massey University)
We warmly invite participants to submit abstracts (250-300 words) for this in-person session at AAG 2024 in Honolulu. The wellbeing of people living in destination communities and the wellbeing of the natural environment in tourism areas is at the heart of this session. Resilience is also central to the session given the social, political, economic and environmental shocks that are increasingly challenging tourism enterprises. How the industry, government and communities respond to these shocks will have major impacts on the possibilities for tourism to contribute to future wellbeing of people and nature in tourism places. This session will consider theoretical ideas on how tourism can contribute to resilience and wellbeing, while also highlighting examples of the impacts tourism is having in specific places and spaces, and how different actors are responding to the challenges.
We encourage submissions on a wide range of related topics, including but not limited to:
Please contact Regina Scheyvens (r.a.scheyvens@massey.ac.nz) and Apisalome Movono (a.movono@massey.ac.nz) with your ideas or any questions about the session, and be sure to submit your abstract, both to Regina and Apisalome as well as the AAG, by the cut off date of 16 November 2023.
Contemporary Chinese Tourism: Critical theories from the East
Honggang Xu (Sun Yat-sen University), Harng Luh Sin (Singapore University of Social Sciences) & Chin-Ee Ong (Macao Institute for Tourism Studies)
Contemporary Chinese tourism is a complex, multi-faceted and rapidly evolving phenomenon that demands our attention as critical scholars. Set upon a country with immense economic and social-cultural changes in the last century, China constantly challenges what we understand about tourism, and how we conceptualise tourism. This special session therefore invites critical scholars to explore alternative theorisations of tourism through looking at contemporary Chinese tourism, while seeking to consolidate what is now a mature and expansive set of literatures on tourism in/from/to China. By recentring Asian scholarship, we also seek to sensitise academic scholarship to the multiple but significant nuances in the interpretations of objects, actions, processes and impacts in the worlds of contemporary tourism in/from/to China so as to reveal yet greater insights. We explore and interrogate these via three interrelated trajectories: 1) Rethinking and Reconceptualising (China/Chinese) tourism, 2) New Chinese Tourism Geographies and 3) Implications, Consequences and ‘the work’ of China/Chinese tourism.
1. Rethinking and Reconceptualising (China/Chinese) Tourism (Theoretical and Cultural Frameworks):
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words and a short author(s) biography by email to Harng Luh, Sin (hlsin@suss.edu.sg) before 31 Oct 2023. This session is sponsored by the AAG Recreation, Tourism, & Sport Specialty Group, the AAG China Geography Specialty Group, and the Geographical Society of China, Tourism Geography commission.
Climate Change and Tourism
Patrick Brouder (Thompson Rivers University)
In the age of the Anthropocene, the impacts of climate change are all too real. Tourism cannot escape these impacts and more and more places around the globe are having to deal with the devastation that climate-related events are causing. As a highly adaptive sector tourism places are proving resilient to the impacts of climate change but the combination of short-term impacts from major climate-related events and long-term impacts of more incremental climate change remain a major challenge for tourism places going forward.
Topics welcome in these sessions include, but are not limited to:
Session Option 1 - Paper Session
All geographers are invited to submit abstracts for this session including early career scholars and students attending the AAG. Both tourism geographers and other geographers with a place-based interest in regions where climate change and tourism are to the fore are most welcome. Perspectives of Indigenous knowledge holders and insights from other marginalised groups are particularly welcome.
Please submit abstracts to the AAG system and to Patrick Brouder (pbrouder@tru.ca) as soon as possible and no later than November 15th, 2023. If you have any questions about the session please do not hesitate to email the session organizer.
Session Option 2 - Panel Session
All geographers are invited to send an expression of interest for being a speaker in this panel including early career scholars and students attending the AAG. Both tourism geographers and other geographers with a place-based interest in regions where climate change and tourism are to the fore are most welcome. Perspectives of Indigenous knowledge holders and insights from other marginalised groups are particularly welcome.
Please email Patrick Brouder (pbrouder@tru.ca) as soon as possible and no later than November 1st, 2023. If you have any questions about this panel please do not hesitate to email the session organizer.
Geographies of Magical Tourism: Storytelling, heritage, fantasy, and folklore
Jane Lovell (Canterbury Christ Church University) & Nitasha Sharma (The University of Alabama)
The popularity of tourist visits to sites associated with magic-related films and novels such as Harry Potter, the rise of cosplay and Comic-Con, and folkloric traditions indicate the increasing relevance of magical tourism in contemporary society. The rise of magical tourism has been fuelled by films and big-budget TV productions like The Witcher, Wheel of Time, Game of Thrones, and Lord of the Rings that leave audiences keen to visit their filming locations, festivals, or theme parks associated with the stories (Buchmann, A., Moore, K., and Fisher, D., 2010). Magical elements play a key role in tourism products, as exemplified by Canada’s Supernatural British Columbia marketing brand; visits to ancient heritage sites like fairy rings in Ireland to experience their evocative atmospheres; and the incorporation of local myths and ghost stories in site interpretation at organizations such as English Heritage. In addition, the manufacture of magic in the form of the invention of suggestive and uncanny atmospheres through technology in the form of light installations, or magical exhibitions like Harry Potter: A History of Magic at The British Library have become so commonplace that the phrase ‘magi-heritage’ is frequently used to describe how heritage, culture, and traditions have been given a magical spin to broaden their appeal to audiences (Lovell, 2019).
For this virtual session, we encourage submissions/presentations that connect tourism with the following topics/themes:
This is a fully virtual session. Abstracts should be 250-300 words and sent to us at Jane Lovell (jane.lovell@canterbury.ac.uk) and Nitasha Sharma (nitashar.iu@gmail.com) as early as possible after registering for the AAG 2024 conference.
AAG Call for Papers & Sponsorship
If you would like RTS to sponsor your tourism geographies-related panel session and advertise your proposed panel on the AAG-RTS website (see below), please send the co-chairs (Jennie Germann Molz - jmolz@holycross.edu and Joseph Cheer - J.Cheer@westernsydney.edu.au) an email with your title and panel abstract and include "AAG-RTS Sponsorship" in the subject line. We look forward to including your panels in the RTS lineup!
RTS Social
We are planning to host a social event for RTS members who will be attending the 2024 AAG! If anyone is from the Honolulu area and/or is interested in helping plan the event, please email Jennie and Joseph about joining the RTS social committee to plan the event.
Preparing for the Honolulu 2024 Annual Meeting
Finally, the AAG is piloting an approach to better connect the conference to the place where it is held. This includes hosting a virtual learning series between July and March with webinars featuring Hawaiian speakers and perspectives on a range of issues. You can find more information and register for these webinars on the AAG website.
AAG DEADLINES
- November 16: Abstract Submission deadline
- December 14: Session Organizing deadline
- January 18: Program Released
- February 29: Abstract/Session Editing and Presentation Conversion deadlines
- March 14: Program Finalized
- April 16-20: Annual Meeting
Sponsored Panel Sessions:
AI and Big Data in Tourism and Hospitality: social media, spatially distributed data and data mining
Andrei Kirilenko (University of Florida)
Based on successful Tourism Analytics sessions held at AAG from 2018, we are inviting oral presentations on data intensive and spatial analysis in tourism with particular interest in data mining, text mining, image recognition, user-generated content, GIS analysis and similar application outlined in Description section. This session is targeting innovative advanced data intensive research in tourism with the goal of exchanging ideas, new approaches, and potential collaborations. Please e-mail paper titles and abstracts to session organizers Andrei Kirilenko (Andrei.Kirilenko@ufl.edu) prior to the deadline. Abstracts may not exceed 250 words.
The data revolution, which started during the past decade, brought new possibilities for decision making and innovation based on the novel methods of analysis of (typically) vary large sets of data. Tourism Analytics is a new area in tourism research and education. Evidentially, the field is highly fragmented, the methods to analyze data are not firmly set, are still evolving and very fluid. However, the following common key areas, and methods emerge:
- Spatial data analysis and visualization with GIS. Includes mapping of tourist routes, travel photo locations, geo-locations of tweets, and other spatially distributed social data.
- Analysis of social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and similar platforms), online customer reviews, tourist experiences reported online and other user-generated content. Involves network analysis, data mining and text analysis.
- Large Language Models (ChatGPT, BARD, LLAMA, etc.) in tourism applicaitons
- Analysis of unstructured data: text analysis, analysis of photos and videos
- Sentiment analysis: one of the most active research areas in natural language processing, web/social network mining, and text/multimedia data mining.
- People as sensors (digital traces, big data from sensory experiences, Google glasses and such)
- Robotics in Tourism and Hospitality
Tourism Today
Svetlana Stepchenkova (University of Florida)
This is a fully online session organized by Svetlana Stepchenkova (svetlana.step@ufl.edu). Abstracts should be 250-300 words. The format of the Tourism Today session is Virtual Lightning Paper. The lightning paper session is a larger group of short presentations summarizing research or studies in process in a particular field. It provides the audience with a rapid and intensive overview of research and allows for more in-depth discussion between presenters and the audience. More details on this format are available here.
This section is geared toward tourism, recreation, hospitality, and events researchers. It is especially beneficial for doctoral and master students who want to share their work, obtain feedback, and practice presentation skills in a time-limited format. In-progress, early-results, and completed studies are welcome! The section accepts a wide variety of studies that deal with issues that tourism faces today, including but not limited to:
- Preservation of the natural environment and cultural heritage, over-tourism;
- Sustainable, smart, and resilient destinations;
- Resource conservation behavior;
- Equitable distribution of socio-economic benefits of tourism for local communities;
- Community-based tourism;
- Tourism, quality of life, and wellness;
- Crisis and disaster management;
- Augmented and virtual reality in tourism;
- Social media-induced tourism;
- Artificial intelligence and robotization in tourism, hospitality, and events.
Tourism, resilience and wellbeing
Regina Scheyvens (Massey University) & Apisalome Movono (Massey University)
We warmly invite participants to submit abstracts (250-300 words) for this in-person session at AAG 2024 in Honolulu. The wellbeing of people living in destination communities and the wellbeing of the natural environment in tourism areas is at the heart of this session. Resilience is also central to the session given the social, political, economic and environmental shocks that are increasingly challenging tourism enterprises. How the industry, government and communities respond to these shocks will have major impacts on the possibilities for tourism to contribute to future wellbeing of people and nature in tourism places. This session will consider theoretical ideas on how tourism can contribute to resilience and wellbeing, while also highlighting examples of the impacts tourism is having in specific places and spaces, and how different actors are responding to the challenges.
We encourage submissions on a wide range of related topics, including but not limited to:
- The meaning of resilience, or wellbeing, in tourism
- Changing narratives of wellbeing and resilience in tourism discourse
- Impacts of tourism on the wellbeing of those working and living in tourism destinations
- Initiatives which promote the wellbeing of people (residents/employees) and/or the natural environment in tourism locales
- Regenerative approaches to tourism
- Government, private sector or community responses to shocks impacting on tourism
- Resilience of tourism businesses and dependent communities in the face of disasters and other social, political, economic and environmental shocks.
- Examples of emergent leadership (from government, industry or civil society) which is supporting wellbeing-centred approaches to tourism, and/or resilience building.
- Initiatives to advance resident control and wellbeing, especially in the face of overtourism.
Please contact Regina Scheyvens (r.a.scheyvens@massey.ac.nz) and Apisalome Movono (a.movono@massey.ac.nz) with your ideas or any questions about the session, and be sure to submit your abstract, both to Regina and Apisalome as well as the AAG, by the cut off date of 16 November 2023.
Contemporary Chinese Tourism: Critical theories from the East
Honggang Xu (Sun Yat-sen University), Harng Luh Sin (Singapore University of Social Sciences) & Chin-Ee Ong (Macao Institute for Tourism Studies)
Contemporary Chinese tourism is a complex, multi-faceted and rapidly evolving phenomenon that demands our attention as critical scholars. Set upon a country with immense economic and social-cultural changes in the last century, China constantly challenges what we understand about tourism, and how we conceptualise tourism. This special session therefore invites critical scholars to explore alternative theorisations of tourism through looking at contemporary Chinese tourism, while seeking to consolidate what is now a mature and expansive set of literatures on tourism in/from/to China. By recentring Asian scholarship, we also seek to sensitise academic scholarship to the multiple but significant nuances in the interpretations of objects, actions, processes and impacts in the worlds of contemporary tourism in/from/to China so as to reveal yet greater insights. We explore and interrogate these via three interrelated trajectories: 1) Rethinking and Reconceptualising (China/Chinese) tourism, 2) New Chinese Tourism Geographies and 3) Implications, Consequences and ‘the work’ of China/Chinese tourism.
1. Rethinking and Reconceptualising (China/Chinese) Tourism (Theoretical and Cultural Frameworks):
- Frameworks of tourism shaped by Chinese and Asian philosophies
- Interactions and reworkings of theories from ‘the West’ with Chinese thought, policy and practice
- Chinese conceptualisations of nature, ecology and tourism
- Chinese cultural framings and interpretations of mobilities, travel and touris (including as observed in literary works and contemporary/internet fiction)
- Frameworks of gender and/in tourism
- Class and social hierarchies inherent in tourism
- New critical tourism geographies of visual consumption and social mediated tourism (网红打卡 wanghong daka )
- New critical tourism geographies of period costume-play or hanfu experiences
- New critical tourism geographies of augmented and virtual realities, metaverse and virtual tourism
- New critical tourism geographies of e-payments and digital transactions
- New critical tourism geographies of village revitalization tourism
- Soft-power and Chinese tourism
- Geopolitical considerations and impacts of Chinese tourism
- Panda diplomacy and panda tourism
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words and a short author(s) biography by email to Harng Luh, Sin (hlsin@suss.edu.sg) before 31 Oct 2023. This session is sponsored by the AAG Recreation, Tourism, & Sport Specialty Group, the AAG China Geography Specialty Group, and the Geographical Society of China, Tourism Geography commission.
Climate Change and Tourism
Patrick Brouder (Thompson Rivers University)
In the age of the Anthropocene, the impacts of climate change are all too real. Tourism cannot escape these impacts and more and more places around the globe are having to deal with the devastation that climate-related events are causing. As a highly adaptive sector tourism places are proving resilient to the impacts of climate change but the combination of short-term impacts from major climate-related events and long-term impacts of more incremental climate change remain a major challenge for tourism places going forward.
Topics welcome in these sessions include, but are not limited to:
- Climate services and communications in tourism and recreation
- Indigenous knowledge, tourism and climate change
- Last chance tourism from a climate change perspective
- Touristic and recreational footprints and climate change mitigation
- Tourism and recreation destinations’ vulnerability and resilience to climate change
- Degrowth in tourism and recreational area limits in climate change affected regions
- Displacement and dissolution of tourism activities as a result of climate-related events
Session Option 1 - Paper Session
All geographers are invited to submit abstracts for this session including early career scholars and students attending the AAG. Both tourism geographers and other geographers with a place-based interest in regions where climate change and tourism are to the fore are most welcome. Perspectives of Indigenous knowledge holders and insights from other marginalised groups are particularly welcome.
Please submit abstracts to the AAG system and to Patrick Brouder (pbrouder@tru.ca) as soon as possible and no later than November 15th, 2023. If you have any questions about the session please do not hesitate to email the session organizer.
Session Option 2 - Panel Session
All geographers are invited to send an expression of interest for being a speaker in this panel including early career scholars and students attending the AAG. Both tourism geographers and other geographers with a place-based interest in regions where climate change and tourism are to the fore are most welcome. Perspectives of Indigenous knowledge holders and insights from other marginalised groups are particularly welcome.
Please email Patrick Brouder (pbrouder@tru.ca) as soon as possible and no later than November 1st, 2023. If you have any questions about this panel please do not hesitate to email the session organizer.
Geographies of Magical Tourism: Storytelling, heritage, fantasy, and folklore
Jane Lovell (Canterbury Christ Church University) & Nitasha Sharma (The University of Alabama)
The popularity of tourist visits to sites associated with magic-related films and novels such as Harry Potter, the rise of cosplay and Comic-Con, and folkloric traditions indicate the increasing relevance of magical tourism in contemporary society. The rise of magical tourism has been fuelled by films and big-budget TV productions like The Witcher, Wheel of Time, Game of Thrones, and Lord of the Rings that leave audiences keen to visit their filming locations, festivals, or theme parks associated with the stories (Buchmann, A., Moore, K., and Fisher, D., 2010). Magical elements play a key role in tourism products, as exemplified by Canada’s Supernatural British Columbia marketing brand; visits to ancient heritage sites like fairy rings in Ireland to experience their evocative atmospheres; and the incorporation of local myths and ghost stories in site interpretation at organizations such as English Heritage. In addition, the manufacture of magic in the form of the invention of suggestive and uncanny atmospheres through technology in the form of light installations, or magical exhibitions like Harry Potter: A History of Magic at The British Library have become so commonplace that the phrase ‘magi-heritage’ is frequently used to describe how heritage, culture, and traditions have been given a magical spin to broaden their appeal to audiences (Lovell, 2019).
For this virtual session, we encourage submissions/presentations that connect tourism with the following topics/themes:
- Magic, historical representations, cultural heritage and folklore
- Magic and authenticity
- Magic, religion, spirituality, and the sacred
- Magic, popular culture and transmedia representations
- Place-based myths, rural and urban legends
- Supernatural and mythical entities
- Magic and dark/ horror elements
- Multi-cultural and non-Western representations of magic
- Magic, affect and atmospheres
- Archaeology, architecture, installations, and aesthetics in magical tourism. E.g. magical light installations, Gothic castles
- Magic, commodification, and marketing. E.g., troll souvenirs in Scandinavia
- Affective encounters and ritual embodiments in magical tourism (e.g., shamanism, Pagan and neo-pagan rituals)
- The sublime and uncanny in magical tourism
- Festivals, theme parks, carnivals, and magical events
This is a fully virtual session. Abstracts should be 250-300 words and sent to us at Jane Lovell (jane.lovell@canterbury.ac.uk) and Nitasha Sharma (nitashar.iu@gmail.com) as early as possible after registering for the AAG 2024 conference.
