2026 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers
The PDF below details all of the RTS Sponsored Sessions and the timings from the preliminary schedule. Links will require you to use your AAG login to access.
Your browser does not support viewing this document. Click here to download the document.
The AAG Annual Meeting will be held in San Francisco, California from March 17-21, 2026, and we are currently inviting proposals for sessions and papers. To submit an abstract or session proposal, please click here. We particularly encourage you to put together sessions with colleagues working on allied topics and themes.
Important Deadlines:
October 30: Abstract Submission
December 4: Session Organizing
Other Important Dates:
January 8: Program released
January 29: Abstract/Session editing and presentation conversion deadlines
February 19: Program finalized
To register, please click here. Early Bird registration closes on September 4.
If you have any questions, please contact AAG-RTS Chair Prof. Jennie Germann Molz ([email protected]) or Communications Director Dr. Bailey Ashton Adie ([email protected]).
Plenary Lectures
Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
"Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Tourism"
Sponsored by the Tourism Geography and Political Geography Specialty Groups
Andrei Kirilenko, Department of Tourism, Hospitality & Event Management, University of Florida
"Big Data and GIS in Tourism Geography"
Sponsored by the Tourism Geography Specialty Group
Dates and times will be confirmed when the program is published.
Sponsored Sessions
Between primary residence and recreational territories: The complex geographies of second home tourism
Session organizers: Amrei Aubrunner (Umeå University), Roger Marjavaara (Umeå University), and Ezra Zeitler (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire)
Second homes (also referred to as holiday, recreational, seasonal, or vacation homes) are used as an occasional residence by owners with a permanent address elsewhere. While their owners make important social and economic contributions in their host communities, second homeownership has produced economic, political, and cultural tensions with permanent residents.
In many regions, the rising number of second homes has contributed to gentrification in local housing markets, driving up property prices and, in some cases, leading to displacement of permanent residences/locals. At the same time, second homes can act as an important driver for rural development; by preventing housing abandonment, sustaining local services, supporting infrastructure, and stimulating economic growth, and helping to prevent demographic and economic decline. These contrasting dynamics highlight the complex and sometimes conflicting roles of second homes in shaping local economies, social structures, and a place's identity.
Recent global shifts, including the rise of remote work and pandemic driven lifestyle changes, have intensified these dynamics, leading to new forms of mobility and multi-local living. These changes/developments often lead to challenges for policymakers and planners, as the needs of permanent residents and second homeowners can differ significantly. At the same time, second homes raise important questions about sustainable development and municipal planning, highlighting the diverse landscape of the housing sector.
This session intends to highlight contemporary studies in second home research from a diverse range of theories, methods, applications, locations, geographic scales, and temporal settings, including (but not limited to):
+ Examinations of mobility and multi-residential lifestyles
+ Impacts of pandemic and post-pandemic use of second homes
+ Housing affordability and displacement
+ Environmental impacts of second home developments
+ Second home governance and policy
+ Tensions between second homeowners and permanent residents
+ Place-based identities and attachment
+ Demographic shifts in second home ownership
+ Novel methodologies in second home tourism research
+ New directions in the definition of second homes
+ Potential economic development paths for second home tourism areas
We welcome submissions for both virtual and in-person presentations. If interested, please send a 250-word abstract to Amrei Aubrunner ([email protected]), Roger Marjavaara ([email protected]), and Ezra Zeitler ([email protected]) by 22:00 GMT on Monday, October 27. Participants will be notified before the AAG abstract submission deadline on October 30. To be scheduled in the session, participants must be registered for the AAG Meeting (www.aag.org/events/aag2026) and send their AAG PIN to session organizers.
Labor Mobilities as Spatial Fix: Crisis and the Uneven Geographies of Tourism Work
Session organizers: Mary Mostafanezhad (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) and Tara Duncan (Thompson River University)
Labor is on the move. Building on Andrew Herod’s (1997) concept of labor’s spatial fix, this panel examines how tourism workers’ mobilities are reshaping the geographies of global capitalism. The growing flexibility of labor across destinations has generated new forms of tourism labor mobility that function as a spatial fix, displacing labor costs, extending accumulation across geographic scales, and sustaining profitability. At the same time, these new labor mobilities facilitate the offloading of the burdens of social reproduction onto workers’ bodies, households, and states. Mobility thus constitutes both a mechanism of value extraction and an adaptive spatial strategy through which workers reconfigure capital’s uneven geographies. We invite papers that theorize and empirically explore how tourism labor mobilities mediate the crises of accumulation and reproduction. Submissions may examine how mobile forms of labor, ranging from seasonal, rotational, and transnational work to digital nomadism and platform gig labor, produce new sites and relations of accumulation, precarity, and resistance. We particularly welcome papers that engage feminist political economy, labor geography, and mobilities framings to analyze how production and social reproduction are linked across embodied, household, regional, and global scales. Collectively, the papers in this session seek to move tourism geography beyond its conventional focus on fixed destinations and infrastructures, foregrounding instead mobility as a terrain of struggle. By attuning to workers’ spatial praxis, from cruise ship corridors and resort kitchens to short-term rental cleaning networks and digital nomad circuits, the panel interrogates how labor mobilities are reshaping the geography of capitalism in the global tourism industry.
Send us your abstract by Tuesday, October 28th!
If you are interested in participating, please send a 250-word abstract to Mary ([email protected]) and Tara ([email protected]) by Wednesday, October 29th. We will notify contributors of acceptance on a rolling basis. Please note that the AAG abstract submission deadline is Thursday, October 30th. Once you have registered and have submitted your abstract, you will receive a PIN number. Please forward this PIN to us so that we can attach your abstract to the panel. You can revise your abstract on the AAG platform until January 29, 2026.
References & Inspirations
Azcárate, M. C. (2020). Stuck with tourism: Space, power, and labor in contemporary Yucatán. University of California Press.
Brenner, N. (1998). Between fixity and motion: accumulation, territorial organization and the historical geography of spatial scales. Environment and planning D: Society and space, 16(4), 459-481.
Cresswell, T., Dorow, S., & Roseman, S. (2016). Putting mobility theory to work: Conceptualizing employment-related geographical mobility. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 48(9), 1787-1803.
Dorow, S., Roseman, S. R., & Cresswell, T. (2017). Re‐working mobilities: Emergent geographies of employment‐related mobility. Geography Compass, 11(12).
Eisenschitz, A. (2016). Tourism, class and crisis. Human Geography, 9(3), 110-124.
Fletcher, R. (2011). Sustaining tourism, sustaining capitalism? The tourism industry's role in global capitalist expansion. Tourism Geographies, 13(3), 443-461.
Fletcher, R., & Neves, K. (2012). Contradictions in tourism: The promise and pitfalls of ecotourism as a manifold capitalist fix. Environment and Society, 3(1), 60-77.
Harvey, D. (1981). The spatial fix–Hegel, von Thunen, and Marx. Antipode, 13(3), 1-12.
Harvey, David. 1982. The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Herod, A. (1997). From a geography of labor to a labor geography: Labor's spatial fix and the Geography of capitalism. Antipode, 29(1), 1-31.
Jessop, B. (2006). Spatial fixes, temporal fixes and spatio‐temporal fixes. David Harvey: A critical reader, 142-166.
Lapointe, D., & Coulter, M. (2020). Place, labor, and (im) mobilities: Tourism and biopolitics. Tourism Culture & Communication, 20(2-3), 95-105.
Perceptions, Placemaking, and Community Change
Session Organizer: Nicholas Wise (Arizona State University)
[email protected]
Description:
Communities are constantly in motion—reshaped by development projects, environmental crises, cultural expression, and shifting identities. Placemaking can inspire collective identity and belonging, yet it can also reveal inequities, exclusions, and vulnerabilities. As communities navigate pressures from urban redevelopment, climate adaptation, tourism, or cultural renewal, perceptions of place become deeply entangled with broader narratives of resilience, displacement, and aspiration.
This session invites papers that explore how perceptions of place are formed, contested, and transformed through processes of placemaking and community change. Whether through physical design, policy interventions, artistic practices, or collective memory, placemaking reflects ongoing negotiations between people, nature, and living environments.
Contributions that critically examine how placemaking serves as both a driver and a reflection of social, cultural, and ecological transitions. Topics may include (but are not limited to):
-Regeneration strategies and its impacts on identity and belonging
-The role of media, narrative, and representation in shaping perceptions of place
-Community-based or participatory approaches to planning and resilience
-Participatory and creative approaches to community research
-Intersections of environmental crisis or post-disaster recovery on urban design and public space
-Tensions between development, displacement, and local well-being
-Their influence of creative placemaking on collective meaning
This session encourages dialogue across human geography and encourages interdisciplinary perspectives spanning geography, urban studies, planning, tourism, landscape architecture, and cultural studies. This session aims to examine how place is imagined, made, and sometimes unmade—and what these processes reveal about the future of community life in an era of change. In the session we will explore placemaking practices both shape and reflect community change in an era of overlapping social and environmental uncertainty.
Perceptions, Placemaking, and Community Change
Sustainable Development in Tourism
Jarkko Saarinen (University of Oulu and University of Johannesburg)
The need for sustainable development in tourism has been discussed since the turn of the 1990s. About 50 years ago Gerardo Budowski (1976) discussed the complex relationships between tourism impacts and conservation in his seminal paper Tourism and Environmental Conservation: Conflict, Coexistence, or Symbiosis? Well before that the idea of carrying capacity was used to analyze the impacts of tourism and how to estimate the limits of tourism in various environmental and sociocultural settings. As a result of this long history of research, scholars have developed an understanding on the nature and mechanisms of tourism impacts on various ecological, social and economic environments, and sustainability has become an important policy framework for tourism developers and policymakers. Thus, what once represented an alternative route for development has become a core paradigm in development discussions, research and policymaking.
Despite all this, however, many scholars estimate that tourism has become more unsustainable and irresponsible than ever before. Indeed, there is a growing amount of frustration among scholars on the idea and efficiency of sustainability and how the contemporary tourism industry’s goals and practices relate to the original ideals of sustainable development. This has resulted in searching on new frameworks, such as resilience and regenerative tourism, but also critical re-thinking of the idea of sustainability in tourism in a local-global nexus. This session aims to discuss and rethink the ideas sustainable tourism in geographical research and discuss the needs for developing new conceptual and/or governance frameworks for evaluation the limits to tourism growth and its evolving impacts in the age of climate crisis and polycrisis. The session welcomes both conceptual papers and empirical case studies.
This is a jointly sponsored session by the AAG Recreation, Tourism & Sport Specialty Group, IGU Commission on Geography of Tourism, Leisure and Global Change.
Important Deadlines:
October 30: Abstract Submission
December 4: Session Organizing
Other Important Dates:
January 8: Program released
January 29: Abstract/Session editing and presentation conversion deadlines
February 19: Program finalized
To register, please click here. Early Bird registration closes on September 4.
If you have any questions, please contact AAG-RTS Chair Prof. Jennie Germann Molz ([email protected]) or Communications Director Dr. Bailey Ashton Adie ([email protected]).
Plenary Lectures
Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
"Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Tourism"
Sponsored by the Tourism Geography and Political Geography Specialty Groups
Andrei Kirilenko, Department of Tourism, Hospitality & Event Management, University of Florida
"Big Data and GIS in Tourism Geography"
Sponsored by the Tourism Geography Specialty Group
Dates and times will be confirmed when the program is published.
Sponsored Sessions
Between primary residence and recreational territories: The complex geographies of second home tourism
Session organizers: Amrei Aubrunner (Umeå University), Roger Marjavaara (Umeå University), and Ezra Zeitler (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire)
Second homes (also referred to as holiday, recreational, seasonal, or vacation homes) are used as an occasional residence by owners with a permanent address elsewhere. While their owners make important social and economic contributions in their host communities, second homeownership has produced economic, political, and cultural tensions with permanent residents.
In many regions, the rising number of second homes has contributed to gentrification in local housing markets, driving up property prices and, in some cases, leading to displacement of permanent residences/locals. At the same time, second homes can act as an important driver for rural development; by preventing housing abandonment, sustaining local services, supporting infrastructure, and stimulating economic growth, and helping to prevent demographic and economic decline. These contrasting dynamics highlight the complex and sometimes conflicting roles of second homes in shaping local economies, social structures, and a place's identity.
Recent global shifts, including the rise of remote work and pandemic driven lifestyle changes, have intensified these dynamics, leading to new forms of mobility and multi-local living. These changes/developments often lead to challenges for policymakers and planners, as the needs of permanent residents and second homeowners can differ significantly. At the same time, second homes raise important questions about sustainable development and municipal planning, highlighting the diverse landscape of the housing sector.
This session intends to highlight contemporary studies in second home research from a diverse range of theories, methods, applications, locations, geographic scales, and temporal settings, including (but not limited to):
+ Examinations of mobility and multi-residential lifestyles
+ Impacts of pandemic and post-pandemic use of second homes
+ Housing affordability and displacement
+ Environmental impacts of second home developments
+ Second home governance and policy
+ Tensions between second homeowners and permanent residents
+ Place-based identities and attachment
+ Demographic shifts in second home ownership
+ Novel methodologies in second home tourism research
+ New directions in the definition of second homes
+ Potential economic development paths for second home tourism areas
We welcome submissions for both virtual and in-person presentations. If interested, please send a 250-word abstract to Amrei Aubrunner ([email protected]), Roger Marjavaara ([email protected]), and Ezra Zeitler ([email protected]) by 22:00 GMT on Monday, October 27. Participants will be notified before the AAG abstract submission deadline on October 30. To be scheduled in the session, participants must be registered for the AAG Meeting (www.aag.org/events/aag2026) and send their AAG PIN to session organizers.
Labor Mobilities as Spatial Fix: Crisis and the Uneven Geographies of Tourism Work
Session organizers: Mary Mostafanezhad (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) and Tara Duncan (Thompson River University)
Labor is on the move. Building on Andrew Herod’s (1997) concept of labor’s spatial fix, this panel examines how tourism workers’ mobilities are reshaping the geographies of global capitalism. The growing flexibility of labor across destinations has generated new forms of tourism labor mobility that function as a spatial fix, displacing labor costs, extending accumulation across geographic scales, and sustaining profitability. At the same time, these new labor mobilities facilitate the offloading of the burdens of social reproduction onto workers’ bodies, households, and states. Mobility thus constitutes both a mechanism of value extraction and an adaptive spatial strategy through which workers reconfigure capital’s uneven geographies. We invite papers that theorize and empirically explore how tourism labor mobilities mediate the crises of accumulation and reproduction. Submissions may examine how mobile forms of labor, ranging from seasonal, rotational, and transnational work to digital nomadism and platform gig labor, produce new sites and relations of accumulation, precarity, and resistance. We particularly welcome papers that engage feminist political economy, labor geography, and mobilities framings to analyze how production and social reproduction are linked across embodied, household, regional, and global scales. Collectively, the papers in this session seek to move tourism geography beyond its conventional focus on fixed destinations and infrastructures, foregrounding instead mobility as a terrain of struggle. By attuning to workers’ spatial praxis, from cruise ship corridors and resort kitchens to short-term rental cleaning networks and digital nomad circuits, the panel interrogates how labor mobilities are reshaping the geography of capitalism in the global tourism industry.
Send us your abstract by Tuesday, October 28th!
If you are interested in participating, please send a 250-word abstract to Mary ([email protected]) and Tara ([email protected]) by Wednesday, October 29th. We will notify contributors of acceptance on a rolling basis. Please note that the AAG abstract submission deadline is Thursday, October 30th. Once you have registered and have submitted your abstract, you will receive a PIN number. Please forward this PIN to us so that we can attach your abstract to the panel. You can revise your abstract on the AAG platform until January 29, 2026.
References & Inspirations
Azcárate, M. C. (2020). Stuck with tourism: Space, power, and labor in contemporary Yucatán. University of California Press.
Brenner, N. (1998). Between fixity and motion: accumulation, territorial organization and the historical geography of spatial scales. Environment and planning D: Society and space, 16(4), 459-481.
Cresswell, T., Dorow, S., & Roseman, S. (2016). Putting mobility theory to work: Conceptualizing employment-related geographical mobility. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 48(9), 1787-1803.
Dorow, S., Roseman, S. R., & Cresswell, T. (2017). Re‐working mobilities: Emergent geographies of employment‐related mobility. Geography Compass, 11(12).
Eisenschitz, A. (2016). Tourism, class and crisis. Human Geography, 9(3), 110-124.
Fletcher, R. (2011). Sustaining tourism, sustaining capitalism? The tourism industry's role in global capitalist expansion. Tourism Geographies, 13(3), 443-461.
Fletcher, R., & Neves, K. (2012). Contradictions in tourism: The promise and pitfalls of ecotourism as a manifold capitalist fix. Environment and Society, 3(1), 60-77.
Harvey, D. (1981). The spatial fix–Hegel, von Thunen, and Marx. Antipode, 13(3), 1-12.
Harvey, David. 1982. The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Herod, A. (1997). From a geography of labor to a labor geography: Labor's spatial fix and the Geography of capitalism. Antipode, 29(1), 1-31.
Jessop, B. (2006). Spatial fixes, temporal fixes and spatio‐temporal fixes. David Harvey: A critical reader, 142-166.
Lapointe, D., & Coulter, M. (2020). Place, labor, and (im) mobilities: Tourism and biopolitics. Tourism Culture & Communication, 20(2-3), 95-105.
Perceptions, Placemaking, and Community Change
Session Organizer: Nicholas Wise (Arizona State University)
[email protected]
Description:
Communities are constantly in motion—reshaped by development projects, environmental crises, cultural expression, and shifting identities. Placemaking can inspire collective identity and belonging, yet it can also reveal inequities, exclusions, and vulnerabilities. As communities navigate pressures from urban redevelopment, climate adaptation, tourism, or cultural renewal, perceptions of place become deeply entangled with broader narratives of resilience, displacement, and aspiration.
This session invites papers that explore how perceptions of place are formed, contested, and transformed through processes of placemaking and community change. Whether through physical design, policy interventions, artistic practices, or collective memory, placemaking reflects ongoing negotiations between people, nature, and living environments.
Contributions that critically examine how placemaking serves as both a driver and a reflection of social, cultural, and ecological transitions. Topics may include (but are not limited to):
-Regeneration strategies and its impacts on identity and belonging
-The role of media, narrative, and representation in shaping perceptions of place
-Community-based or participatory approaches to planning and resilience
-Participatory and creative approaches to community research
-Intersections of environmental crisis or post-disaster recovery on urban design and public space
-Tensions between development, displacement, and local well-being
-Their influence of creative placemaking on collective meaning
This session encourages dialogue across human geography and encourages interdisciplinary perspectives spanning geography, urban studies, planning, tourism, landscape architecture, and cultural studies. This session aims to examine how place is imagined, made, and sometimes unmade—and what these processes reveal about the future of community life in an era of change. In the session we will explore placemaking practices both shape and reflect community change in an era of overlapping social and environmental uncertainty.
Perceptions, Placemaking, and Community Change
Sustainable Development in Tourism
Jarkko Saarinen (University of Oulu and University of Johannesburg)
The need for sustainable development in tourism has been discussed since the turn of the 1990s. About 50 years ago Gerardo Budowski (1976) discussed the complex relationships between tourism impacts and conservation in his seminal paper Tourism and Environmental Conservation: Conflict, Coexistence, or Symbiosis? Well before that the idea of carrying capacity was used to analyze the impacts of tourism and how to estimate the limits of tourism in various environmental and sociocultural settings. As a result of this long history of research, scholars have developed an understanding on the nature and mechanisms of tourism impacts on various ecological, social and economic environments, and sustainability has become an important policy framework for tourism developers and policymakers. Thus, what once represented an alternative route for development has become a core paradigm in development discussions, research and policymaking.
Despite all this, however, many scholars estimate that tourism has become more unsustainable and irresponsible than ever before. Indeed, there is a growing amount of frustration among scholars on the idea and efficiency of sustainability and how the contemporary tourism industry’s goals and practices relate to the original ideals of sustainable development. This has resulted in searching on new frameworks, such as resilience and regenerative tourism, but also critical re-thinking of the idea of sustainability in tourism in a local-global nexus. This session aims to discuss and rethink the ideas sustainable tourism in geographical research and discuss the needs for developing new conceptual and/or governance frameworks for evaluation the limits to tourism growth and its evolving impacts in the age of climate crisis and polycrisis. The session welcomes both conceptual papers and empirical case studies.
This is a jointly sponsored session by the AAG Recreation, Tourism & Sport Specialty Group, IGU Commission on Geography of Tourism, Leisure and Global Change.
