CFP: Travel and Imagination
Submission deadline: December 23, 2011
Topic areas
Details
Like so many words associated with tourism, ‘imagination’ is an accepted
though somewhat obdurate notion. We accept it because it is, after all,
something that is central to our consciousness and perception,
operating almost imperceptibly whether we are awake or asleep. But
beyond this, imagination also takes up an endlessly complex form because
the term is linked to a constellation of other phenomenon: dreams,
make-believe, fantasy, memory and remembering, perception, the ‘mind’s
eye’, understanding, world-views, learning, story-telling – in all its
many forms – and so forth. It’s a shape-changing phenomenon and it’s
utterly central to the human experience. Given this, we see it as a
concept key to both our everyday lives and the idea of travel and
tourism, producing both ‘imaginative travel’ and the ‘travel
imagination’. Surprisingly, however, there is a dearth of published
material focusing upon the links between the two.
This Call for Papers is an attempt to ‘plug’ the abovementioned gap and
open up new and innovative explorations of travel and imagination. It
seeks contributions that illustrate how imagination becomes a part of,
informs, is informed by and/or is represented as an element of travel.
Crucially, travel should not be read here as something that is limited
to a conceptualisation centred on the ‘experience’ itself, but to any
temporal and spatial boundaries the writer wishes to set. As an initial,
but in no way rigid, guide papers may consider the following themes:
- Travel fantasy, prompted by picture books, fiction, cinema, documentaries, art works, maps, virtual travel and so forth;
- Travel and creativity: artists travelling to create, audiences travelling to see, writers travelling for inspiration, readers reading to ‘escape’ to imaginative worlds and so forth;
- The itinerary as an imaginative act… imagination, plotting, planning...;
- Science fiction and science fantasy: travelling to places that do not exist – literally places of the imagination;
- Desire and the libidinous in travel/imagination (anticipation, day-dreaming, making dreams/fantasies ‘come true’, illusions, seduction);
- Travel and imagining the life of…;
- Making places/events/people ‘real’: travel as a way of anchoring the imagination in physical places, which in turn further feeds the imagination.
In combining these diverse perspectives, this volume will make an
important contribution to a concept that has received inadequate
attention from the tourism and broader mobility disciplines. It is
anticipated that it will include chapters from established figures, but
we also encourage expressions of interest from postgraduate students,
too. We would also like to see submissions that consider perspectives
beyond traditional Western and textual perspectives. A word limit of
6–7,000 is proposed for each chapter (including references).
Writing Schedule
Please submit chapter proposals (abstracts of up to 500 words) to the volume’s editors at [email protected] by 23rd December 2011, with decisions by the editors communicated by
the end of January 2012. First drafts of accepted contributions will be
due by the end of June 2012, with the full manuscript deliverable by the
end of February 2013.