CFP: Destination Management and Mobility Justice for Sustainable Human and More-than-human Futures: Approaching Florence (and Destinations Beyond) in Motion

Keynote Speaker:

Mimi Sheller

Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA

In this interdisciplinary conference, we seek to examine critical issues in the field of global Destination Management and Tourism Mobilities in pursuit of means, modes and practices to promote a greater Mobility Justice within, between, and beyond destinations (Sheller 2018; 2024). Situated within the Florentine context, this conference offers fertile ground for cross-pollination between Florence and other destinations concerned with how Destination Managers and Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) can be pivotal actors, agencies, and organizations committed to a more just, sustainable, and responsible mobile world.

As the politics of mobility play out in real time through the bodies and streets, we see local, national and transnational governance struggle to keep pace with the impacts and drivers of climate change, urbanization, and migration. All the while we watch as mass tourism and overtourism thread impacts through micro, meso, and macro scales. Simultaneously, migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented, stateless, and trafficked persons experience increasing pressures and injustices through the same forces that support the most mobility privileged in global tourist flows. In this entangled web of mobility regimes and infrastructures, it is important to examine where travel and tourism have historically been a cultural force for promoting peace and dialogue, as much as examining where conflict, friction, and tensions have arisen from them. Destinations offer an opportunity to analyze and intervene at specific sites of human migrations and mobilities, and what in hopes of more just tourism mobilities in destinations across the world.  

Florence is no stranger to conflicts over tourism mobilities and tensions within its unique identity as a site of global patrimony. As a destination caught in the crosshairs of its rich past and an uncertain future in this age of polycrisis, conflicting representations and identities intersect, diverge, and weave a complex social fabric. Destination Management offers a targeted lens through which to interrogate the relation between global travel, tourism and mobility justice in Florence and beyond.

As a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Florence represents a rich cultural tourism destination that is increasingly impacted by increasingly global flows and circulations of people, objects, artifacts, information, resources and capital. It has resulted in intersecting crises of housing displacement and homelessness, food insecurity, growing civil protest, increasing environmental resource and climatic constraints, uneven distribution of tourist fluxes between major and minor cultural sites, and loss of local goodwill in response to the immobilities created by tourism.

This conference seeks to bring to light the complexities of questions of justice in a hypermobile world. How does one respect cultural heritage while local peoples and cultures suffer across so many dimensions, often deprived of their cultural rights, unable to access their own heritage sites? How do we support human and more-than-human futures, adaptable and responsive to environmental constraints, changes, and challenges? Many questions arise that require interdisciplinary perspectives.

We invite papers to contribute to the emerging field of Destination Management, focusing on the intersections of issues in social, cultural, environmental, and mobility justice within the roles and responsibilities of Destination Managers and DMOs (Destination Management Organizations). We welcome a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and methods, including case study analyses, historical or contemporary mobilities, and theoretical contributions that are committed to exploring what Justice means within Destination Management theory and practice.

Thematically, we ask contributors to examine how questions of justice can be integrated into interdisciplinary Destination Management scholarship that contend with the domains of travel and tourism. Submissions can include both normative and empirical research broadly relevant to informing questions of Justice and Mobilities, and can broadly range from social sciences, STEM, humanities, and arts fields, and present either contemporary or historical perspectives. We aim to  explore where various areas of justice can be connected to the objectives of Destination Management research as a growing interdisciplinary field. We encourage scholars and practitioners to investigate the applicability of distributive, deliberative, procedural, restorative, and epistemic justice in the framework of their presented contributions.

We are interested in case studies which either (A) center their analyses on Florence, Italy (or the region of Tuscany) in order to seek translatable and transversal solutions for other destinations, or (B) center on global destinations beyond that bring critical insight into the issues facing Florence. We are seeking to find “common ground” amongst the examined problem spaces that exist across destinations to build a growing literature concerned with promoting Mobility Justice within Destination Management. Theoretical contributions should include insight or practical application to transversal issues across Florence and other destinations.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

We ask for 300-word abstracts, submitted with a separate cover page that includes title, name, affiliation, and a short bio of the author(s) of a maximum of 300 words, which can be submitted to [email protected] by November 25th, 2026.

The conference will be held from March 11th to 12th at Gonzaga in Florence, a school of Gonzaga University based in the historic center of the city of Florence. It will be open to the public, by registration. There will be no registration fee to attend the conference. As our inaugural conference, we are unable to offer travel funds at this time.

Topical Areas:

Mobility Justice (motility, capabilities approach, migration, transport, space, accessibility, flows)

a.     Migration, refugees, stateless persons, human trafficking and modern day slavery

b.     Critical Disability Studies & mobility infrastructures for travel & tourism industries

c.     The Right to the City, labour, and yransportation equity

d.     Mobility, technological transformation, and electrification

e.     Climate Mobility Justice and immigration/refugee crises

Social Justice (intersectionality, human rights, kinopolitics distributive justice, reparation, processual justice)

a.     Indigenous Rights and Land Consent

b.     Human rights Abuses in the travel and tourism industry

c.     Intercultural exchange for responsible, sustainable, and peace tourism

d.     Reparative justice, public policy, media, and communications

e.     Critical Disability Studies and transport justice

Cultural Justice: (heritage studies, restoration and repatriation, cultural property, political ecology)

a.     Art, antiquities, museum studies, and decolonization

b.     Cultural heritage, human rights, and access to culture

c.     Cultural property trafficking, return and restitution, reclamation, and reparations

d.     Museum security, contemporary eco-vandalism and protest movements

e.     Conflicts in historiography of heritage and Post-conflict reconstruction

Environmental Justice (environmental racism, geoengineering, pollution and carbon, biodiversity and reparations, More-than-human ethics):

a.     National parks, seascapes, urban green space, and depavement movements

b.     Plastic pollution, chemical colonialism, exposomics, and water protectors

c.     Protected habitats, ecotourism and politics of spared or shared land

d.     Agriculture, food Justice, “The Commons”, land sovereignty, and eco-activism

e.     Botanical gardens, zoos, “beasts of burden”, and more-than-human mobility

Conference Organizers:

Denise Regina Percequillo Hossom

Gonzaga University

Alesia Koush

Gonzaga University

UNESCO Chair - University of Siena

https://www.gonzaga.edu/gonzaga-in-florence/public-events/conferences/dstm-2027-conference