Tourist skills of mobility

Conference session

Session convenors: Maarja Kaaristo and Ilze Mertena (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

The key elements of any practice are meanings, materialities and competences (Shove, Pantzar & Watson, 2012). Yet while meanings (values, motivations, representations, narrations, discourses) have been extensively scrutinised and materialities also have recently gained considerable attention, competences – including skills – remain comparatively underexplored. The extant studies have almost exclusively focused on those necessary for various specialist, often adventure tourism activities. Consequently, commonplace skills – mundane, attentive, practical forms of know-how used to support ordinary non-discursive and habitual enactments – have gained little attention (Mertena, Kaaristo and Edensor, 2022). Critically, although many mobility practices in tourism are performed unreflexively, like wayfinding or travelling to and from a destination, they are dependent upon the acquisition of diverse skills that range from the mundane to the expert.

All tourist skills are learned, regardless of whether they are commonplace (such as gazing and sightseeing skills) or specialist (such as, for instance, boat-handling skills). Tourists therefore become competent in performing tourism by learning how to travel and engage with spatial and material worlds (Lucas, 2022). Skills facilitate any tourism practice to be carried out effortlessly and with confidence. Accordingly, this session seeks to better understand the acquisition and use of tourist skills in various mobility contexts. Rather than investigating specialist abilities often gained through lengthy training, we invite presenters to focus on the various commonplace skills of tourism that unreflexively emerge to facilitate diverse everyday tourist practices, such as orienting in an unfamiliar city, travelling on public transport, planning a trip, and many others.

Topics might include (but are not limited to):

- learning tourist skills (including within communities of practice) 

- different qualities and dimensions of skills (frequency of usage, formal recognition of skills) 

- materialities and skill 

- skills and embodiment 

- representations of skills 

- skills needed for different types of tourism mobilities.  

- the progressive development of tourist skills from novice to expert. 
 

If you would like to present, please send an abstract (300 words max) to the session organisers (m.kaaristo@mmu.ac.uk and i.mertena@mmu.ac.uk) no later than 5 May 2022. All abstracts should include a title of presentation and the names, affiliations, email addresses and short bio-notes (100 words max) of all authors.

The T2M Conference will be held in Padua, Italy, 21-24 September 2022. It is planned as a hybrid (in person and online) event. For more details about the conference, please see https://www.mobilityandhumanities.it/t2m2022conference/.