Rethinking the Toolkit In Turbulent Times: Tourism, Rights and (Im)Mobilities across East Asia and Beyond

Turbulence does not only disrupt tourism systems; it strains the concepts we use to study them. The climate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical fragmentation and deepening inequalities have exposed, with unusual clarity, the limits of a conceptual toolkit — tourist, host, destination, free time, the gaze, authenticity, mobilities — largely forged in mid-twentieth-century Western contexts and naturalised through global circulation. This session treats these categories not as transparent windows onto reality but as historical artefacts, and asks what turbulent times reveal about their fragility.

The premise is that present contradictions are not merely empirical challenges requiring updated datasets; they are invitations to conceptual revision. When remote work settles into seaside second homes, when outdoor sports annex whole territories for upper-class distinction, when grassroots anti-tourism movements contest the visitor economy, the boundary between leisure, tourism, residence and labour dissolves — and inherited categories misdescribe the (im)mobilities they were meant to capture.

The session invites theoretical, epistemological and empirically grounded papers addressing: the genealogies and blind spots of foundational concepts; the asymmetries of race, class, gender and coloniality they reproduce; how Global South, indigenous and decolonial perspectives reformulate them; which mobilities and sociabilities dominant frameworks render invisible; and whether the leisure/tourism divide can itself be productively interrogated. Cross-regional perspectives, early-career researchers and scholars based outside Europe and North America are strongly encouraged.

Keywords

conceptual critics · epistemology · sociology of leisure · sociology of tourism · (im)mobilities · decolonial sociology · reflexivity · inequalities · Global South