Sensory Tourism

Open session.

This panel explores sensory tourism, broadly defined. It aims to provide glimpses of a world in which (in)tangible heritage links sensory experiences with collective memory making and personal biography. Constructions of cultural heritage shape tourism. For some time now new consumers have driven trends in tourism markets centred on kitsch, nostalgia, historical events and trauma, locales, monuments, natural wonders, and extreme experiences. Appealing to a diversity of local and global audiences, novel sensorial-cultural tourism experiences have become a means for cultivating one’s identity and personal biography. In rural community development, sustainable tourism and cultural entrepreneurship illustrate this transformation. Growing in popularity in global north and south contexts, agritourism aims to provide authentic tourism experiences that mobilize, integrate, and challenge sensory embodiment from farm to table of guests and build new agricultural markets and cosmopolitan lifestyles of hosts. Updating the comfort and high quality of the short-term organized tour format for a culturally oriented and internet savvy generation focuses on new configurations of the senses, memory, and (in)tangible culture. Contrasting sensory experiences of rural and urban, natural and built environments, and the twinned future orientations of sustainability and more-than-human approaches is also intriguing. In what ways has tourism reshaped the senses and expanded (or dulled) perceptions of sensory experience? The panel seeks to build a set of interdisciplinary cases to explore multiple aspects of these and related phenomena and contribute to understanding in what ways sensory experiences shape contemporary tourism.