With this interdisciplinary collection of essays we endeavor to make the investigation of tourism productive for central concerns in cultural studies. Metaphors of movement and diversity are beginning to replace notions of stability and consensus in the formulation of concepts such as self, identity, nation, and belonging. Tourism, Travel and Transnational Transformation takes its cues from Dean MacCannell’s seminal study The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976), who was among the first to raise pertinent questions of travel and tourism as a global cultural form. With the programmatic reference to Thorstein Veblen, MacCannell with his Marxist critique underscores the significance of tourism as a “representation of contemporary social systems” (see Hall and Williams 2002) which subsequently offers insights into the production of social structures otherwise obscured by the complex global interconnections produced by internationalization and globalization. We follow MacCannell’s claim that travel and tourism constitute a “primary ground for the production of new cultural forms on a global base” (1992: 1), and that they, therefore, also require a new, global ethics of travel and perception (MacCannell 2011).
If it is true that we are living in a world where “cross-border interchange of people, goods, assets, ideas, and cultures” (Dunning qtd. in Burns 1999: 117) has become the norm, then we could gain valuable insights from the investigation of tourism as a pioneering, albeit ambivalent phenomenon in the global transformations towards a universalized network of economic, political, and cultural values. A cultural reading of tourism’s representations could grant access to the discourses which frame (recreational) traveling, gauging not only the material/economic effects of tourism but also uncovering its cultural politics. Secondly, approaching tourism as a specific form of mobility not only allows to highlight regimes of differences, but also to reveal global continuities and contiguities, dependencies and entanglements. Understanding travel and tourism thus as a cultural practice of globalization suggests, thirdly, to investigate it from a decidedly transnational angle in order to gauge how and to what extent tourism “dramatically influences the entire range of economic, cultural, environmental, and even political values that in some combination constitute the modern world” (Theobald 459). We contend that the study of tourism provides innovative approaches to understanding how groups constitute themselves and how they formulate and frame their respective identities under the conditions of global interaction. We do think that answers to the questions raised could be given by researchers in the fields of cultural studies, cultural geography, cultural anthropology, the political and social sciences, (public) history, museum studies and performance studies.
We therefore invite papers which engage tourism and travel empirically and/or theoretically from the perspectives of
• travel theory, tourism discourses
• economies of tourism, souvenirs and the global market
• tourism and globalization; tourism and the resurgence of the local
• tourism and heritage
• dark tourism
• encounter histories and cultural transformation
• tourism and the politics of memory and identity

Please send a short abstract of 200-250 words by July 31, 2012 to: Juliane Schwarz-Bierschenk (Juliane.Bierschenk@sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de)
and Andrea Zittlau (andrea.zittlau@uni-rostock.de) Full papers (around 5,000 words) are to be submitted by February 15, 2013.

Burns, Peter M. An Introduction to Tourism and Anthropology. London: Routledge, 1999.
Hall, Colin Michael, and Allan M. Williams, eds. Tourism and Migration: New Relationships Between Production and Consumption. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002.
MacCannell, Dean. Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers. London: Routledge, 1992.
---. The Ethics of Sightseeing. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011.
---. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. 3rd ed. Berkeley: U California P, 1999 (1976).
Theobald, William F., ed. Global Tourism. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005. 459.