Critical Considerations
With key challenges and more with Prof Brielle Gillovic & Prof. Alison McIntosh, both of Auckland University of Technology (New Zealand). Both are authors of seminal research within the field of accessible tourism, and are each contributing chapters to the upcoming Handbook of Accessible Tourism (Hansen et al., 2025).
We shall also hear from Dr Francisco Peco-Torres and Dr Ana Polo-Pena, University of Granada Spain about the Erasmus+ Project called SAFE (Sustainable Accessible Future Environments)
Holocaust Heritage Digilantism: Community Reactions to Holocaust Selfies on Instagram View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Craig Wight
Discursive, netnographic and visual methods have been applied in the past to critique self-images, providing insight into the behaviours of tourists. However, such studies have ignored reactions to self-image posts on social media, and particularly to those that are captured within sites of atrocity. Based on an analysis of Instagram, and drawing on Scheurich’s grid of social regularities, this paper critiques the practice of digilantism, coding the identity variables that shape punitive attitudes towards perceived morally transgressive behaviour at Holocaust tourism sites. The study introduces the presence and richness of visitor interpretation at such sites shapes the extent to which self-images are consciously organised, and where respectful consumption is deemed important, behavioural expectations should be communicated to visitors. It is also proposed that there is a need for greater recognition that visitor behaviours are challenging to enforce, particularly in the backdrop of a public culture that embraces self-images, and the practice of sharing on social media.
Parca’s Picks : Or How Wild Chances are Entangled with a Post-Pandemic Requiem Love Story in a Troubled Tourist Paradise View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kenneth Little
Parca is a Belizian woman living in a beach town that has “gone crazy” for Caribbean, paradise tourism. She plays Boledo, the national gambling game. The rules of the game are simple. Pick numbers and put as much money on them as your seductions dare you to. Parca’s Boledo picks are numbers that resonate when they feel right, and that's when she is hailed by them to play the game. Then things get complicated. Parca’s picks multiply moments of desire for something else of life, something excitable, expressed against emergent paradise tourism futurities, felt through the post-pandemic racket of tourist street noise inciting contingent material-semiotic linkages that rub up against a Belize hooked to a world of “unsustainable sustainable tourism” that some call its "last resort." I consider Parca’s picking strategies as a machine that cuts, assembles, and produces desire out of affective forces, bodily agitations that summon some numbers and not others, that propel and create openings and fluxes of novel relations that promise life otherwise. Parca’s picks are enactments of change because they encourage novel entanglements. I track how her picks keep Parca poised at the chancy edges of the sensible, where rogue bodily agitations trouble official images of paradise to become the affective refrains of life lived otherwise. How does Parca’s poetics of desire trouble official tourist “tropicalizations” of local life to become a process for instantiating a politics of seduction that is attached to, yet incommensurate with, the swirl of a global-imperial paradise tourism in Belize?
Featured Choose Fun™: Sound, Seasickness, and Coercion in Cruise Tourism’s Oceanic Postcolonial
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ken Tianyuan Ge
This paper draws on oceanic theory, Black studies, and musicological analysis to develop three critical concepts (seasickness, coercion, and oceanic postcoloniality) framing my dissertation research on music, labor, and affect in the contemporary global cruise tourism industry. As a music scholar, I deploy seasickness—a dysphoric condition resulting from the inner ear’s misalignment with its surroundings—as an organizing metaphor for how tourist subjects apprehend (or fail to apprehend) the modalities of racial capitalism buoying up the cruise industry. Seasickness figures prominently in my analysis of David Foster Wallace’s 1996 essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” Wallace’s nausea, I suggest, forms the tonal center of his critique, which is directed simultaneously at the industry’s imperative of “mandatory fun” and his fellow cruisers’ ability to ignore or rationalize the starkly racialized and transnational dynamic between labor and leisure onboard. Sonic coercion, embodied in both the blasting of the ship’s horn and the discursive maneuvers of Wallace’s cruisers, thus reveals itself as a compensatory technique by which the cruise industry’s postcolonial condition is drowned out (at least, for some) by the sounds of vacation . My discussion concludes with an analysis of the spate of viral cruise marketing that followed in the wake of Pharrell Williams’s 2013 hit, “Happy,” in which I demonstrate the ability of Western popular music to operate coercively within leisure capitalism, ultimately arguing that turning a seasick ear toward such techniques offers a crucial—if uncomfortable—platform for critique.
