Destination Management and Mobility Justice for Sustainable Human and More-than-human Futures: Approaching Florence and Destinations Beyond in Motion
March 11 and 12, 2027
Florence, Italy
Conference Registration Details Coming Soon
Call for Submissions | Due November 25
Keynote Speakers
Mimi Sheller, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA
In this interdisciplinary conference, we seek to examine critical issues in the field of global Destination Management and Tourism Mobilities in pursuit of means, modes and practices to promote a greater Mobility Justice within, between and beyond destinations (Sheller 2018; 2024).
Situated within the Florentine context, this conference offers fertile ground for cross-pollination between Florence and other destinations concerned with how Destination Managers and Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) can be pivotal actors, agencies and organizations committed to a more just, sustainable and responsible mobile world.
As the politics of mobility play out in real time, we see local, national and transnational governance struggle to keep pace with the impacts and drivers of climate change, urbanization and migration. All the while we watch as mass tourism and overtourism thread impacts through micro, meso and macro scales. Simultaneously, migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented, stateless and trafficked persons experience increasing pressures and injustices through the same forces that support the most mobility privileged in global tourist flows.
In this entangled web of mobility regimes and infrastructures, it is important to examine where travel and tourism have historically been a cultural force for promoting peace and dialogue, as much as examining where conflict, friction, and tensions have arisen from them. Destinations offer an opportunity to analyze and intervene at specific sites of human migrations and mobilities, and what in hopes of more just tourism mobilities in destinations across the world.
Florence is no stranger to conflicts over tourism mobilities and tensions within its unique identity as a site of global patrimony. As a destination caught in the crosshairs of its rich past and an uncertain future in this age of polycrisis, conflicting representations and identities intersect, diverge and weave a complex social fabric. Destination Management offers a targeted lens through which to interrogate the relation between global travel, tourism and mobility justice in Florence and beyond.
As a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Florence represents a rich cultural tourism destination that is increasingly impacted by increasingly global flows and circulations of people, objects, artifacts, information, resources and capital. It has resulted in intersecting crises of housing displacement and homelessness, food insecurity, growing civil protest, increasing environmental resource and climatic constraints, uneven distribution of tourist fluxes between major and minor cultural sites, and loss of local goodwill in response to the immobilities created by tourism.
This conference seeks to bring to light the complexities of questions of justice in a hypermobile world.
How does one respect cultural heritage while local peoples and cultures suffer across so many dimensions, often deprived of their cultural rights, unable to access their own heritage sites?
How do we support human and more-than-human futures, adaptable and responsive to environmental constraints, changes, and challenges? Many questions arise that require interdisciplinary perspectives.