NS34 Session 23

HOME       About the conference       Program       Sessions       Abstract submission

Practical information       Organisation & committees       PhD Seminar

Title: Walking towards more-than-human tourism futures

Organisers: Elva Björg Einarsdóttir, Emily Höckert, Jasmine Zhang and Maxim Vlasov

Affiliation: University of Iceland, University of Lapland, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umeå University

Description

This outdoor session explores walking as a relational practice. It consists of situated, shared, and uncertain steps with the symposium landscape of Öskjuhlíð as a participant in inquiry. Through collective movement and small-scale experimental interventions, we ask what tourism might become if it cultivated more-than-human relations rather than extracted value.

The session joins efforts within the environmental humanities and social sciences that challenge the prevailing nature–culture dichotomy by asking how more-than-human communities might coexist in creative, reciprocal, and regenerative ways. Rather than relying solely on techno-scientific solutions, we are interested in how alternative ontologies, conceptualisations, and embodied practices may help repair weakened relations between ecosystems and human sociocultural worlds. This prompts the question: what would it mean for tourism to “walk differently”?

Across the Nordic region, climate walks, ecological pilgrimages, and slow mobility initiatives are emerging as embodied responses to ecological concern and responsibility. Such practices are broadening our understanding of tourism and outdoor recreation amid the ecological crisis. Rather than focusing on what walking produces (well-being, economic value, resilience), this session explores how walking might shape relations between people, species, temporalities, places, research practices, and lived worlds.

We invite participants to contribute a short proposal for a walking-based intervention to be enacted outdoors (10-15 minutes). Contributions should be experiential rather than paper presentations and may include micro-interventions, sensory exercise, embodied methods, site-responsive reading, concept or question to walk with, relational experiment, or other practice-based inquiry. In your proposal, please include a tentative title, a brief description of the proposed walking intervention, an outline of what participants will be invited to do, any spatial or material requirements, and a short reflection on how the contribution engages with more-than-human tourism futures.

We welcome unfinished ideas, experimental formats, and practice-based explorations. Accepted contributions will be woven into a collective walking itinerary across Öskjuhlíð, inviting symposium participants to join the session as co-walkers.