Walking/tourism: as a commodity, an approach, a methodology and ‘a trouble’

In this presentation I will discuss some reflections that I have developed since I started enquiring ‘walking holidays’ (Rabbiosi, 2021). Walking has been significantly commoditised in the Global North in the last two decades, and has recently been portrayed as a means of escaping the limitations on tourism mobility during the Covid-19 crisis. While walking is often represented as an easy activity in common promotional discourse, I argue that it is much more complex. In the first part of my presentation, I will focus on walking, both as a tourist practice and as a research method with the aim to illuminate the overlooked entanglement of space, material practices, affects and cognitive work emplaced in walking tourism. In the second part of my presentation, I will engage with recent advancements in Tourism Studies and Gender and Feminist Studies, to review how tourism and walking combine to advance knowledge of the differentials that inform mobilities patterns. In the conclusion, I will try to bridge the first and the second part of my presentation by claiming for epistemologies and methodologies that may represent ‘a trouble’ for tourism theorizations, advocating the contribution of relational feminist thinking and concurring with the recent suggestion by Carina Ren (Ren, 2021) that we should ‘stay’ with this trouble if we want to deliver richer accounts of tourism.

Rabbiosi, C. (2021). Performing a walking holiday: Routing, immersing and co-dwelling. Tourist Studies, 21(3), 367–386. doi: 10.1177/1468797621998177

Ren, C. (2021). (Staying with) the trouble with tourism and travel theory? Tourist Studies, 21(1), 133–140. doi: 10.1177/1468797621989216
 

Bio

Chiara Rabbiosi is Associate Professor in Economic and Political Geography at the University of Padova, Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World, Centre for Advanced Studies Mobility&Humanities–MoHu. Her research interests address the social and spatial dimensions of mobilities, including tourism mobilities, cultural heritage and place branding. At the University of Padova she is an active member of the MoHu and MobiLab centres at the DiSSGeA, and she teaches on the Masters in Local Development and in Mobility Studies. She is currently working on tourist spatial imaginations of Europe, and how Europeanisation is created through experiences of tourist mobilities, and on the transit of tourism (including walking and multi-modal transport), aimed at understanding tourist transportation in an embodied and performative way. She has also recently explored walking and video-making as teaching methods, and is currently considering these experiences as mobilities pedagogies. Chiara likes to alternate her scientific writing between Italian and English. She has published in diverse international academic journals including Annals of Tourism Research; Tourist Studies; Cultural Geographies; Gender, Place and Culture; Journal of Consumer Culture.
 

Registration for the zoom link
https://framaforms.org/inscription-au-seminaire-penser-avec-et-par-le-tourisme-1663772535