NS34 Session 2

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Title: Reworking Inclusion in Place Branding: Power, Ethics, and Transformation

Organisers: Jörgen Eksell, Maria Månsson, Emma Björner, and Eva Maria Jernsand

Affiliation: Lund University, Gothenburg University

Description

Tourism and place branding have long been criticised for their exclusionary tendencies, privileging dominant actors, simplified narratives, and human-centred imaginaries. These dynamics are produced not only through governance and planning practices, but also through communication, including branding narratives, visual representations, storytelling, media discourses, and digital platforms. In response, research on inclusive place branding has emerged as an ethically grounded field concerned with representation, participation, co-creation, and the distribution of benefits. Recent work conceptualises inclusion not as a fixed outcome but as a relational, communicative, and political process, shaped by power, positionality, and responsibility, with implications for more equitable futures.

This session invites transformative contributions that move inclusive place branding beyond managerial or instrumental framings and critically interrogate how inclusion and exclusion are communicated, negotiated, contested, and materialised through branding practices. We particularly welcome work that understands inclusion as an ethical principle and examines who (and what) is included, how inclusion is enacted through communicative practices, and which voices, bodies, knowledges, and relations are marginalised, silenced, or rendered invisible.

Aligning with broader critical, communicative, and posthuman turns in tourism and place studies, the session explicitly encourages critical, decolonial, feminist, posthuman, and multispecies approaches. We seek papers that explore how places are branded, narrated, lived in, and governed through entanglements of discourse, materiality, and more-than-human relations, including non-human animals, ecosystems, technologies, and infrastructures. Such perspectives open new questions about justice, care, vulnerability, agency, and responsibility in place branding and place communication.

Overall, the session aims to create a space for theoretical, methodological, and empirical work that treats inclusive place branding as a communicative site for transforming places, identities, imaginaries, governance arrangements, and more-than-human relations, rather than as a purely normative or aspirational goal.

We welcome conceptual, empirical, methodological, and experimental contributions, including critical reflections, speculative or provocative pieces, and work-in-progress. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches are particularly encouraged.