Hotel Anthropocene is a new hotel advertised as a luxury all-inclusive resort. It was until recently operated under the name of ´Hotel Holocene´, but due to the widespread attention the Anthropocene has received the new owners decided to change its name. The day at the Hotel Anthropocene, written in the form of fiction, renders different ways of knowing, feeling, sensing, conceptualizing, and practising real time ecological mutation. The guests are increasingly dissatisfied and they gradually realise that something is terribly wrong with the hotel. The dialogues and heated discussions take place in the hotel lobby, corridors, rooms, the pool-bar, the restaurant, the common room, and they disclose cognitive and emotional dissonances in relation to the future.

The chapter invites the reader to critically reflect upon tourism futures in relation to contemporary climate change and planetary ethics. It disrupts the idea of touristic bubbles without entanglements and responsibility with the ongoing crisis. The chapter also draws attention to a fundamental paradox of tourism, where search for wellbeing and hedonistic joy simultaneously contribute to accelerating climate change. The story at the hotel problematizes the conceptualization and practices of a ‘common future’, especially the future as a utopian time that lies ahead. Consequently, towards the end, the guests begin to realise that there is, unfortunately, no check-out from this hotel.

The story of Hotel Anthropocene also raises questions about our responsibilities as researchers and teachers when using fiction as method for producing and sharing knowledge of our current and future planetary situation in the Anthropocene. How do different kinds of stories tune us in, or out? What kinds of storytelling and story listening should we engage in if we wish to contribute to a more caring, sustainable, hospitable and peaceful co-existence in our one and only common “hotel” when cast in dire predictions of its planetary future?

There I was sitting on my Airport-hotel-room’s balcony, gathering sunbeams and breathing warm Mallorca air. I had the world’s biggest smile on my face: it felt almost surreal to be on this island for a tourism conference. I had lived here eleven years ago when I studied tourism at The University of the Balearic Islands and worked at a hotel by the Palmanova beach. Well, it merits mention that during that time I did not only fall in love with Palma and the entire island, but also with a fellow exchange-student from Sweden. What else could I have done but smile; I was back in amazing Mallorca, reading the 7th Critical Tourism Studies’ (CTS) conference programme and getting more and more excited about the forthcoming four days of conferencing.

Kan man använda begreppet ’gästfrihet’ om näringsidkare inom turismbranschen? Vad menar vi egentligen med ’gästfrihet’? Emily Höckert visar, att frågorna är komplicerade. Utmaningen består i hur vi ska beskriva mötet mellan människor.

During the past years, I have slowly moved from the role of a student towards a role of ateacher and supervisor. While doing this, I have hoped to continue to approach pedagogicalencounters as a learner. In line with critical pedagogy, I embrace the possibilities of mutuallearning where the roles of teachers and learners are constantly kept in move. The paper athand draws closer attention to travel readings and guidelines that I wish to carry with me onmy pedagogical journey.

As being a big fan of Emmanuel Levinas’ (1969) idea of ethical subjectivity aswelcome and Nel Nodding’s (1984; 2002) research on ethics and care, this paper is driven bycuriosity of how the notions of hospitality and care can help to envision and embody moreresponsible pedagogies. I use the idea of hospitable pedagogies to draw focus on host-guestrelations in teaching and learning. These two philosophers, Levinas and Noddings, approachethics as relational – as something that takes place in relations between ourselves. Whileacknowledging the fundamental role of ‘I’ in ethical encounters, they seem to agree thatwelcoming and care cannot be treated as projects of an individual subject – or of an individualteacher. Instead, responsibility takes always place in an intersubjective relation with the other.

Hospitality and pedagogy have been previously brought together, for instance, intheological education, international relations and indigenous studies. In these discussions, thenotion of hospitality is connected to the issue of giving and welcoming the gifts of knowledge.By joining these streams of thoughts, can help to reflect how different ways of knowing andbeing can be welcomed through more hospitable approaches in teaching. The main purpose ofthis paper in the making, is to engage in a discussion about possibilities and challenges ofmobilizing the roles of hosts and guests in our classrooms.

Keynote speaker:

Emily Höckert is a Postdoctoral fellow in tourism studies at the Linnaeus University in Sweden in the Department of Organisation and Entrepreneurship. In the broadest level, her research is driven by curiosity of how hosts and guests welcome each other in responsible tourism encounters. She approaches the questions of hospitality, ethics and care by drawing on hermeneutic phenomenology and postcolonial philosophy. Emily is the author of Negotiating Hospitality (2018) and co-author of Disruptive Tourism and Its Untidy Guests (2014), which both discuss about relational ways of being in tourism settings. 

How do hosts and guests welcome each other in responsible encounters? This book addresses the question in a longitudinal ethnographic study on tourism development in the coffee- cultivating communities in Nicaragua. The research follows the trail of development practitioners and researchers who travel with a desire to help, teach and study the local hosts. On a broader level, it is a journey exploring how the conditions of hospitality become negotiated between these actors. The theoretical approach bases itself on the ethical subjectivity as responsibility and receptivity towards ‘the other’. The ideas put forward in the book suggest that hospitality, responsibility and participation all require a readiness to interrupt one’s own ways of doing, knowing and being.

This book provides a conceptual tool to facilitate reflection on alternative ways of doing togetherness and will be of interest to students and researchers of hospitality, tourism, development studies, cultural studies and anthropology.

Fables are stories of the more-than-human-world, starred by animals, plants, and objects with human characters. Fables and fabulation have traditionally been directed to children and have served a pur-pose of teaching moral lessons with a melancholic tone. While the method of ‘dumping data’ about environmental change and mass extinction have proved to be less effective ways of rising humans’ awareness and empathy towards the non-human-members of the Earth (Morton 2010; 2018), there exists an urgent need to alternative ways of understanding, discussing and being in the Anthropocene.

Acknowledging the importance of storytelling and storylistening in the Anthropocene, the paper at hand draws inspiration from empirical philosopher Vinciane Despret’s genre of ‘scientific fables’. The beauty and purpose of her way of scientific fabulation is to complicate, specify, slow down and hesi-tate so that multiple voices can be heard. The purpose of the paper is to discuss the ways in which scientific fables allows us to visit and gather around matters of care in more-than-human-worlds. The importance of moral lessons in fables is here connected to the ideas of ecological and minimal ethics that call for openness and wonder towards radical otherness. More specifically, the paper is driven by curiosity about the ways in which scientific fables might open new, welcoming spaces between ourselves.

The article illuminates one of the central ethical questions concerning tourist photography: the ways in which tourists photograph local people in tourist destinations. In line with the previous research on tourist photography, the study suggests that tourists’ experiences of responsible behaviour become continuously re-defined and negotiated in relations with others. Through a hermeneutic phenomenological analysis of tourists’ accounts, the study focusses on the role of the face in photography; that is, how encountering the face of the other interrupts the photographer and calls for heightened responsibility and reflection. Drawing on the Levinasian idea of ethics as being-for-the-other, the article visualizes relational ethics that do not originate from the tourist’s gaze, but from the face of the other.

My left-hand-mitten is missing. The green-and-white one that I had received as a birthday present and I had hugged hundreds of times in my hand. It was knitted with care by passionate handicraft tourist, who had bought the STOORSTÅLKA’s yarns from Sapmi. What if it was somewhere covered by wet and heavy snow?

This article is a story of a pair of green-and-white-mittens. The narrative explores the ways in which handicraft tourism and handicrafts connect people and places, enabling various ways of mental travelling. The article joins the ongoing search of relational ethics in tourism research where agency and relationality are not limited to social lives of humans. Building on previous discussions on Actor-Network-Theory in Tourism studies (van der Duim, Ren & Jóhannesson 2017), we explore how non-human actors can mobilize, spread and entangle stories, emotions, affects and care beyond tourist destinations. By using an autoethnographic approach, we knit, purl and unravel stitches, bringing more understanding about phenomenology, materiality and relationality. Hence, instead of observing handicrafts and tourism from distance, we hold on to the knitting needles and become part of the phenomenon we wish to understand. The theoretical pattern is strengthened by pulling threads through loops between non-representational theory, materiality (Thrift 2005; 2008), new-materialism and matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) that draw mind and matter, nature and culture into the same arena. These discussions encourage and guide us to go beyond representation and orientate ourselves towards multiple ways of expressing and experiencing care in tourism settings.

My left-hand-mitten is missing. The green-and-white one that I had received as a birthday present and I had hugged hundreds of times in my hand. It was knitted with care by passionate handicraft tourist, who had bought the STOORSTÅLKA’s yarns from Sapmi. What if it was somewhere covered by wet and heavy snow?  

This article is a story of a pair of green-and-white-mittens. The narrative explores the ways in which handicraft tourism and handicrafts connect people and places, enabling various ways of mental travelling. The article joins the ongoing search of relational ethics in tourism research where agency and relationality are not limited to social lives of humans. Building on previous discussions on Actor-Network-Theory in Tourism studies (van der Duim, Ren & Jóhannesson 2017), we explore how non-human actors can mobilize, spread and entangle stories, emotions, affects and care beyond tourist destinations. By using an autoethnographic approach, we knit, purl and unravel stitches, bringing more understanding about phenomenology, materiality and relationality. Hence, instead of observing handicrafts and tourism from distance, we hold on to the knitting needles and become part of the phenomenon we wish to understand. The theoretical pattern is strengthened by pulling threads through loops between non-representational theory, materiality (Thrift 2005; 2008), new-materialism and matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) that draw mind and matter, nature and culture into the same arena. These discussions encourage and guide us to go beyond representation and orientate ourselves towards multiple ways of expressing and experiencing care in tourism settings.   

The need to re-envision alternative paradigms in tourism is becoming evident with the increasingly experienced climate change and degradation of life supporting ecosystem services, to which the tourism industry has a significant adverse contribution. Could tourism be re-envisioned to bring positive effects on social, environmental and individual wellbeing? In this paper, we present the outcome of an extensive literature review and a cross-border post card workshop with researchers and tourism officials. Drawing on this, a conceptual framework of a comprehensive, relational idea of wellbeing tourism is proposed, that extends beyond our current notion of sustainability and the widely used and accepted triple bottom line model (TBL). The suggested model proposes a shift from focusing on sustainability alone, to giving increased attention and value to integral health and to life quality. The paper highlights that wellbeing tourism can only truly be reached when all its suggested six pillars are fulfilled in a relative balance among the community related external ones (environment, economy, social; “sustainability”) and those that may be experienced as individual (body, mind, soul). The importance of wellbeing tourism supporting a society with the governing characteristics of happiness, harmony, and abundance, building collaborative and regenerative systems are emphasised.

Storytelling is a powerful way of exploring the past, crafting values in the present, and imagining the future. Stories, told from different perspectives and drawing from diverse experiences, can build shared understandings, empathy and care. Everyday stories of tourism - coping, success, empowerment, nurturing, disruption, relationship building and activism - are important tools that help students, teachers, researchers, practitioners and community members reflect and learn. The stories that we tell join the streams of wider narratives, shaping our understanding of the world and the ways in which we encounter it, thus providing a worldmaking function. Engaging in storytelling is anything but a benign activity as different narratives are continuously constituting and naturalizing the world and our relations with others. Tourism scholar Keith Hollinshead (2004) describes worldmaking as collaborative processes that essentialize and normalize peoples, places and practices. Hence, the notion of worldmaking calls for critical reflection on the ways in which stories enact, reinforce and alter power relationships by erasing alternative stories and by giving to voices in the margins. For us as tourism educators, storytelling unlock doors, opens new spaces for multiple ways of knowing and being, and moves towards more sustainable, hopeful, caring and ethical worldmaking in tourism.

For us the year passed has been one of conferring around the notions of slowness and silence. It has meant committing ourselves to radical slowness in thinking, living and writing together. We have walked through three seasons of thinking-well, living-well and writing-well together. Embracing the potentialities of not knowing, our aim has been to enjoy one season at a time – in present tense.

The year began with an invitation that sparked collective, speculative imagination of being-well in silence. We entered the season of thinking-well-together, by exchanging short “postcards” of possible social experiments we would like to conduct with each other. The essence of this season was to tune us into artistic methods of dwelling in place, welcoming and being unprepared.

The following season brought us to living-well-together in real life by way of camping together. By camping we refer to an inclusive and mobile social concept without pre-defined goals and divisions into hosts and guests, performances and audiences, workshops and leisure. The event was rooted in place in multiple ways, bringing together researchers, artists, locals and entrepreneurs to dwell-alongside local forms of life and matter.

We are currently in a season of writing-well-together. The writings follow e.g. methodologies of Companion Letters (e.g. Carlin, Light & Veijola 2014) and offer unobtrusive guiding to silence, slowness, hospitality and living-well-together.

Our presentation will set up a small camp around these ideas, their outcomes and new openings. 

In this paper, five authors account for the rethinking of a conference as a series of postcards, letters, rules and silent moments so that traditional hierarchies of knowledge could be overturned or, at least, sidelined. We recount how the place we convened was enlisted as an actor and the dramas and devices we applied to encounter it. We use this accounting to problematize the conventional practices of goal-oriented meetings and co-authored papers as forms of academic meaning-making. In finding a meeting point where expertise was disorientated and status undressed, we were able to investigate the idea of co-being between human and nonhuman realities as the step social theory needs to take to become a point of connection with the social world, instead of an escape from it. We conclude that this involved silence and necessary fictions as a means to consider the future and past in the moment of meeting.