A Month of Adventures: Reimagining a Tourism Future
Adventure Tourism Research Association Webinars
10th, 17th & 24th November 2021
Regular attendees of ATRA’s International Adventure Conference, members of the organisation and those who follow our activities will know that the eighth IAC was due to be held in Queenstown, New Zealand in December 2020, co-hosted with our friends and colleagues at the University of Otago.
2020 was clearly both an unforgettable year and a year to forget and the decision was made at an early stage to not only postpone the event but delay its rescheduling to December 2022 to allow for what we hope by then will be a full recovery to normality, even if many aspects of the world may well have changed irreversibly, not least across the tourism sector.
In order to keep the valuable, and valued, relationships between members of the ATRA community alive, and to forge and cement relationships with academics, and practitioners, new to the adventure tourism realm, we are pleased to announce that ATRA will be hosting four online events, across consecutive weeks, in November 2021.
Under the strapline A Month of Adventures, these concise, two-hour sessions will showcase exciting new research and allow us to debate and discuss emergent contemporary adventure tourism themes. Each week we will be exploring a different concept, as detailed below. We will conclude the series with a webinar to provide a platform and support for PhD students and early career researchers (ECRs) to develop their research ideas.
There will be NO CHARGE for participation.
The members of the ATRA steering group hope that you will be able to join us in November. It will be great to see new faces and old friends alike, and keep the flame alive until we are hopefully able to meet again in person next year.
Webinar Themes
Micro-adventures: Exploring Your Own Backyard
- 10th November 2021
In times when travel has been restricted to fewer destinations and closer to home, Alastair Humphrey’s concept of ‘micro-adventures’ has been celebrated by the adventure tourism scholarship (Mackenzie & Goodnow, 2020). Such localised explorations may contain crucial elements of ‘grand adventures’ however, they are much cheaper, far more simplified, shorter, and are claimed to have multiple positive health and wellbeing effects. Furthermore, they allow us to learn more about what is in our backyard, discover secret corners of our neighbourhood or nearby forests. This session explores how these ‘micro-spaces’ in the vicinity of our homes can be utilised, consumed and interacted with in more mindful and considerate ways.
| Session chair:
Dr Jasmine Goodnow, Western Washington University, USA |
||
| Jasmine Goodnow | Introduction | |
| Beau Miles | Personal insight into The Backyard Adventurer: Meaningful and pointless expeditions, self-experiments and the value of other people’s junk | |
| Gill Pomfret, Carola May & Manual Sand | How adventures affect wellbeing – a systematic literature review | |
| Darío Pérez-Brunicardi & Lucía Benito-Hernando | Little explorers. Outdoor reconnections during COVID-19 confinement and deconfinement | |
| Tina Irving | Can peat contribute to Adventure Tourism? | |
| Jasmine Goodnow | Discussion, Q&A | |
Staying with the Trouble: Adventure in the Anthropocene, Capitalocene & Chthulucene
- 17th November 2021
Inspired by the work of Donna Haraway and others, this track encourages serious philosophical debate on the marginal place of human beings in the world, with particular focus upon how different ways of seeing and thinking about being, ontology and the more-than-human-world might inform our actions as agents in that world.
Staying with the Trouble is a critique of or response to the Anthropocene, in which human beings have a substantial and deleterious effect upon our planet. Haraway encourages us to think of a thickened now – one with a past and a responsible future, and its attendant implications. So for adventure participants that is beyond the ‘self-in-adventure’, where adventure is an identity ingredient, a social media project.
| Session chair:
Professor Peter Varley, Northumbria University, UK |
||
| Peter Varley | Introduction | |
| Chris Loynes | Staying with the Trouble: It’s elemental | |
| Scott Jukes | Reading more-than-human stories in the landscape | |
| Carina Ren, Laura James, Hindertje Hoarau-Heemstra & Albina Pashkevich | Cruise trouble. A practice-based approach to studying Arctic cruise tourism | |
| Joshua David Bennett | Wild Tourism: A Guided Tour at the Intersection of Outdoor Education and Tourism” |
|
| Eva Duedahl & Janne Liburd | Flourishing Futures | |
| Peter Varley | Discussion, Q&A | |
New Horizons: Postgraduate research in Adventure Tourism
- 24th November 2021
This final session provides PhD students and ECRs researching any topic related to adventure tourism an opportunity to share their research in either a ten-minute presentation or a shorter three-minute ‘pitch’. This session will also give insights from a supervisor perspective on the journey of a doctoral project, including preparing for a viva. How research contributes to knowledge will also be covered, and we will explore some strategies you might use when explaining your academic contribution.
| Session chairs:
Professor Carl Cater, Swansea University, UK & Dr Adele Doran, University of Sheffield, UK |
||
| Adele & Carl | Introduction | |
| Chris Eastabrook | Developing the Independent Adventurer | |
| Jason Wragg | Myths, Maps and Motorcycles: an autoethnographic exploration of the pilgrim adventurer | |
| Harriet Wingfiled | An investigation of the relationship between cycling tourists and wellbeing | |
| Break | ||
| Thomas Karagiorgos | The role of brand associations on the development of hiking involvement: The case of mount Olympus | |
| Joe Tierney | Reimaging ageing through adventure (exploring the motivations or older adventurers in Ireland – working title) | |
| Emily Pitts | Cultural Socialisation: The activation of social capital in outdoor adventure leadership | |
| Adele & Carl | Feedback to the presenters, Q&A | |