“I’m a Red River local”: rock climbing mobilities and community hospitalities

With individuals continually on the move, mobility fosters constellations of places at which individuals collectively moor and perform community. By focusing on one climbing destination – the Red River Gorge – this paper works across scales to highlight the spatial politics of mobilizing hospitality. In so doing, it summarizes the ways hosting/guesting thresholds dissolve with the growth of particular rock climbing associated infrastructures and moves to examine the ways climbers performances of community result in the (semi-)privatization of public space and attempts at localization. Further, the paper highlights the ways mobility is employed to maintain a political voice from afar, as well as to forge “local” identities with The Red as place with distinct subcultural (in)hospitality practices. Hospitality practices affirm power relations, they communicate who is at “home” and who has the power in a particular space to extend hospitality. The decision to extend hospitality is not simply the difference between an ethical encounter and a conditional one; it takes place in the very performance of identity. Thus, integrating a mobilities perspective into hospitality studies further illuminates the spatial politics that are at play in an ethics of hospitality

Freedom in mundane mobilities: caravanning in Denmark

Freedom is a widely discussed and highly elusive concept, and has long been represented in exoticised, masculinised and individualised discourses. Freedom is often exemplified through the image of a solitary male explorer leaving the female space of home and familiarity and going to remote places of the world. Through in-situ interviews with families caravanning in Denmark, the primary aim of this study is to challenge existing dominant discourses surrounding the subject of freedom within leisure and tourism studies. Secondly, we shed further light on an under-researched medium of mobility, that of domestic caravanning. This serves to not only disrupt representations of freedom as occurring through exoticised, masculinised and individualised practices, but to give attention to the domestic, banal contexts where the everyday and tourism intersect, which are often overlooked. This novel repositioning opens up new avenues in tourism studies for critical research into the geographies of freedom in mundane, everyday contexts

Affect and performance in ancestral tourism : stories of everyday life, personal heritage, and the family

 Heritage tourism scholars have used notions of performativity and affectto study the ways tourists actively construct and assign meaning to theirexperience of heritage. However, these concepts remain under-exploredin the context of personal heritage tourism. Personal heritage tourismreflects an interest to experience a heritage of personal affectiverelevance, acknowledging that perceptions of heritage are fluid andsubjective. I contribute insight into the conceptualization of personalheritage tourism by exploring the performances and affectiveentanglements that make genealogy meaningful in the present duringtravels to an ancestral homeland. Through a qualitative study ofSwedish-American ancestral tourists, I propose that processes ofmeaning making in ancestral tourism include enacting the family,partaking in everyday life, and connecting with mundane physicalelements of the past. These performances unfold at sites historical andcurrent in the ancestral homeland. Personal heritage tourism thus findsmeaning though affective entanglements with the past, but alsothrough social interactions and mundane activities based in a familiarpresent. These affective entanglements occur at different locations, notall directly connected to the personal past.

Sticky landscapes and smooth experiences: The biopower of tourism mobilities in the Öresund region

As landscapes become ordered according to certain sets of economic, political, ecological or social practices and discourses, other possible orderings become limited in their potential. The article illustrates this with an example taken from the field of tourism and place marketing. The empirical focus is golf experiences in Scania, Sweden, bookable by individual consumers over the Internet. The ordering of what is termed the ‘golfscape’ is unfolded with the help of an assemblage of arguments taken from writings on mobility, biopower and subjectification, post-foundational views of the materiality of the social and recent conceptualizations of the socio-cultural and spatial impact of tourism. The booking sequence, i.e. the interaction between consumer and booking software, is analyzed as a series of negotiations, techniques and technologies of control and enactments of power. It is concluded that mobility studies can benefit from a Foucauldian power perspective when explaining practices of mobility and spatial fixation