NS34 Session 15

 

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Title: Northern Encounters: Grief, Landscape, and Tourism Atmospheres

Organisers: Gina Khamis

Affiliation: University of Girona

 

Description

Tourism literature has long privileged narratives of pleasure, vitality, and escape, often marginalising experiences of loss, vulnerability, and existential disruption. Yet tourism practices such as movement, dwelling, return, and encounter, are deeply entangled with moments of rupture that reshape how people inhabit time, space, and relational worlds. This session proposes grief not as a marginal or exceptional emotion, but as an ontological condition of vulnerability through which the affective, atmospheric, and more-than-human dimensions of tourism become particularly visible. 

Drawing on critical tourism studies, affect theory, and posthumanist and non-representational approaches, the session invites contributions that explore how grief, loss, and vulnerability are lived, sensed, and negotiated through tourism practices. Particular attention is given to affective atmospheres understood as relational forces co-produced by human and nonhuman elements, bodies, landscapes, materialities, weather, and movement, that mediate experiences of travel and meaning-making in contexts of loss. Grief is approached here as durational, spatial, and atmospheric, unfolding through disrupted temporalities, charged environments, embodied mobilities, and landscapes saturated with presence and absence. 

The session welcomes empirical, theoretical, methodological, and creative contributions engaging with themes such as grief and mobility; tourism and vulnerability; affective atmospheres in nature-based, memorial, or everyday tourism contexts; posthuman encounters with landscapes and nonhuman agents; and qualitative, sensory, or experimental methods attuned to affect and embodiment. Reflexive and autoethnographic approaches are particularly encouraged, including work that situates the researcher within atmospheric and relational field settings, such as ongoing autoethnographic engagements with northern landscapes in Laponia to think through vulnerability, exposure, and care in situ. 

By foregrounding grief and vulnerability as constitutive of tourism rather than exceptional to it, this session aims to open new conceptual and methodological pathways for understanding tourism as a site of ontological transformation, ethical encounter, and shared exposure. 

 

Title: With: Relational Ontologies and Ethics for Posthumanism
Authors: Emily Höckert, University of Lapland, Ana María Munar, Katrín Anna Lund, and Claudia Eger

Kin emerge between pine, water, and place. Their pathos and constant movement remind us that being-with questions the borders that our world fights to uphold as if divisions could protect us from death or the apocalypse. Instead, they invite us to engage in creative methodology and translation, to embrace discomfort, ambivalence, and hybridity.

This presentation is an invitation to the evolving space of the forthcoming anthology ‘With: Relational Ontologies and Ethics for Posthumanism’ (Palgrave Macmillan). It articulates the significance of the word with as a generative orientation that names the being and unfolding of relationality. By asking how to live when being is being-with, we reconfigure critical inquiry, opening it to approaches that unsettle dichotomies and the figure of the human as a self-contained and sovereign subject. In doing so, the book cultivates a plurality of responses to posthumanism’s call to attend to multiplicity, difference, and more-than-human worlds in times of grief and existential crises.

The paper reflects on the journey of this volume, attending to the corporeal and messy praxis of collaborative and creative writing and reading-with. The book is presented as a postdisciplinary assemblage – a cross-fertilization of fields, generations, and ways of knowing, brought forward by scholars with diverse backgrounds in tourism, hospitality, leisure, and cultural studies. It maps the rhizomatic nature of the chapters, which explore material, more-than-human, situated, and embodied modes of knowing and becoming-with. Spanning a plurality of locations, histories, communities, temporalities, beings, languages, affects, and concepts, the contributions bring together diverse theories, stories, and methods of encountering, relating, and being with.

 

Title: Mourning with Landscape
Author: Bryan Grimwood, University of Waterloo

In this presentation, I draw from ongoing ethnographic research in Ontario’s “near north” to explore how mourning with landscape may be a useful conceptual frame for navigating the troubles of tourism. When conceptualized relationally, mourning is a social experience of recognizing and moving through the loss of life, lands, or livelihoods. It is, in Haraway’s terms (2022), a practice of living with the wounds of death and ruination which seeks not to return to some former sense of wholeness but rather to learn and enact ways of living well together as members of multispecies communities. Mourning is thus a mode of relating within more-than-human entanglements, one that is inevitably situated and emplaced and that raises questions not only about human grief in place, but about how place itself might grieve and how such grief might be sensed, interpreted, and shared.

In Ontario’s near north, a landscape located roughly 150 kilometres north of Toronto and configured significantly, though not exclusively, by second-home tourism, settler colonial imaginaries of nature, and environmental change, my research is beginning to grapple with how tourism actors might come together to recognize and navigate the ruination of place. In this sense, I approach mourning not only as a response to loss, but as a relational encounter with(in) wounded landscapes that may help unsettle harmful land-based relations of extraction, commodification, and dispossession. To add texture to the presentation, I weave in stories drawn from archival materials, oral histories, personal narratives, and multisensory encounters associated with tourism in the near north; stories that help stitch together what mourning with landscape might open up for tourism as a context for learning to live well with and within damaged worlds.

References

Haraway, D. (2022). On staying with the trouble: Episode 269. For the Wild (podcast).

Available at: https://forthewild.world/listen/donna-haraway-on-staying-with-the-trouble-encore-269.

 

Title: Feeling Tourism Ruination at Niagara Falls, Canada
Author: Michela Stinson, Université du Québec à Montréal

Niagara Falls is an iconic northern-adjacent Canadian tourism destination. It is also a place of tourism ruination; it is a place in which tourism both structures and is structured by processes and conditions of social, environmental, and cultural deterioration. Processes of tourism ruination might first be recognized by their material effects, in that they result in the physical transformation of the landscape (e.g., abandonment, absence, degradation, and decay). But processes of tourism ruination are also deeply affective, as they weigh upon individuals and communities through somatic and atmospheric capacities. In this presentation, I turn to the feeling of ruination—in/of tourism, in/of Niagara Falls—to trace the enduring damage of ruination as a political project in its most ordinary formations (Stoler, 2008; Mah, 2014). Following the style of Gherardi’s (2019) affective ethnography, I consider the effects of slow, mundane, bureaucratic, and lived-with versions of ruination that are difficult to locate (and feel) but may have profound effects on the possible conditions of life in Niagara Falls. I locate these versions through a multi-method tracing of the material-discursive history of local streetscapes and buildings variously defaced by tourism. Ultimately, I aim to make two contributions to the tourism literature: 1. I situate tourism ruination itself as multiply affective, and 2. I suggest that understanding tourism ruination requires an attention to how affects structure ordinary life.

Gherardi, S. (2019). Theorizing affective ethnography for organization studies. Organization, 26(6), 741-760.

Mah, A. (2014). The dereliction tourist: Ethical issues of conducting research in areas of industrial ruination. Sociological Research Online, 19(4), 1-14.

Stoler, A. L. (2008). Imperial debris: Reflections on ruins and ruination. Cultural Anthropology, 23(2), 191-219.

 

Title: Walking Through Loss: Grief, Pilgrimage and Therapeutic Landscapes in the Rural UK
Author: Jaeyeon Choe, Dalarna University

This study examines grief pilgrimage in the rural UK, investigating how ancient walking routes function as therapeutic spaces for the bereaved. Drawing on qualitative interviews with pilgrimage stakeholders, we explore how pilgrimage walks facilitate the processing of grief through embodied practice. Participants emphasised that pilgrimage walks create dedicated spaces for navigating complex emotions, drawing on mechanisms such as immersion in nature, physical movement, grief rituals, and social connection. Notably, parents bereaved of children experienced particularly acute grief and derived significant benefit from sharing their experiences with others who had endured comparable losses. The findings position pilgrimage walks as a holistic coping mechanism that complements clinical intervention, whilst highlighting the need for thoughtful, sensitive design that reflects diverse needs. We further examine its integration within Social Prescribing frameworks as an innovative, inclusive, and community-centred approach to bereavement support. Key implementation considerations include funding, accessibility, and the potential for reframing such journeys as 'wellness walks' to engage those who favour a secular interpretation of pilgrimage. Finally, we offer evidence-based recommendations for policymakers, healthcare professionals, and community organisations. We argue that pilgrimage routes employed in grief support not only foster individual healing, but also promote community wellbeing, heritage preservation, and rural revitalisation.