Tourism Contained (DeterTour) 2024

Delving into the area of interest emerging from the overlapping fields of tourism and mobility studies, the DeterTour research project proposes an interdisciplinary investigation of contemporary urban policies, materialities and narratives of deterrence implemented to bound unwanted tourist mobilities.
Drawing on the legacies of the pandemic, the interpretive lenses of cultural geography and urban studies combine to analyse recent and upcoming laws and regulations aiming to contain tourist mobilities. As a result, the analysis identifies reworked versions of key concepts regulating the limitations on personal mobility during the pandemic, namely footfall and border, as co-constitutive elements of contemporary strategies of deterrence. Significantly, they operate at different scales while disseminating narratives concerning the restrained access to heavily touristed areas, specifically urban destinations.
Emphasising the potentialities of an approach merging mobility and the humanities, DeterTour will employ methodologies that combine critical discourse analysis with im/mobile phenomenological, non-representational explorations of urban spaces to gather and analyse perceptions and experiences of contained tourist mobilities participating in the co-production processes of heavily touristed Southern European urban spaces.

Research group:
Peter Adey, Professor of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Ole B. Jensen, Professor of Urban Theory and Urban Design at the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark
Kaya Barry, Senior Lecturer of Cultural Geography at Griffith University, Australia
Antonio Paolo Russo, Professor of Tourism and Geography at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain

Main partners:
OMERO – CENTRO DI RICERCA IN STUDI URBANI, based at the UNIVERSITY OF TURIN and chaired by Alberto Vanolo
FRINGE URBAN NARRATIVES, based at the UNIVERSIDAD DE ALCALÁ, SPAIN and chaired professor Patricia García

Call for Papers: RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2026

Session Title: Filtering Mobilities: Material, Digital, and Narrative Infrastructures of Inequality in Contemporary Tourism
Convenors: Giuseppe Tomasella & Tania Rossetto

We invite paper proposals for a critical exploration of how contemporary tourism mobilities are systematically filtered, producing new geographies of inequality. This panel examines the hybrid infrastructures – material, digital, and narrative – that choreograph access to place, from smart reservations and physical barriers to moralising discourses of sustainability. Employing a mobility humanities lens, we seek contributions that investigate how these intersecting systems allocate privilege and disadvantage, reshaping embodied experiences, affective atmospheres, and sociality for visitors and residents alike. We are particularly interested in work that analyses the production of classed, racialised, and ableist exclusions, as well as narratives that contest or reimagine these regimes. The session aims to collectively re-politicise leisure mobility and envision more just geographies of movement.

Please send your title, a 200-word abstract, name, and affiliation to giuseppe.tomasella@unipd.it by 15 February 2026.