Hypermobile Worlds, Immobile Lives: Tourism, Inequality, and Fragmented Mobilities

Paradoxes, while seemingly contradictory, reveal the underlying dynamics of complex social realities (Çakmak et al., 2021). Tourism, as a system of global mobilities, is structured by a central contradiction: hypermobility for some coexists with immobility for others. Drawing on mobilities and mobility justice frameworks (Urry, 2007; Sheller, 2018), this session focuses on how mobility is differentially enabled, governed, and constrained. While a kinetic elite accumulates mobility capital through global infrastructures, many others experience mobility poverty shaped by exclusion, regulation, and limited access to safe and affordable movement.

We approach these contradictions through the lens of paradox, not to resolve them but as analytical entry points for interrogating how tourism mobilities are structured, experienced, and contested, and how they shape connections and fragmentation across diverse contexts. Welcoming contributions on authority, mobility justice, and global inequality, this session invites papers that explore the paradoxical workings of mobilities in tourism, particularly in relation to the (re)production of heritage and tradition and the fluid reconfiguration of identities as ongoing processes of becoming. This session particularly invites interdisciplinary contributions that critically examine (im)mobilities as embedded within the complex and evolving entanglements of tourism. Topics might include but not limited to:

• Paradoxes of hypermobility and immobility in tourism systems
• Mobility capital and regimes of inequality
• Tourism within the climate crisis, and environmental inequalities
• Borders, surveillance, and the governance of mobility
• Infrastructure, power, and socio-spatial inequalities
• Tourism and the reproduction of global inequalities
• Alternative mobilities, post-carbon futures
• Mobility poverty, embodied experiences
• (Im)mobility and the achievements of SDGs