NS34 Session 15

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.