Issue coordinated by:

• Étienne Faugier, Lecturer in History, Université Lumière Lyon 2 (France), Laboratoire d’études rurales)

• Léopold Lucas, Lecturer in Geography, Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale (France), Laboratoire TVES)

As tourism practices seem to have not only returned to their pre-Covid-19 pandemic levels, but rather to have remained unchanged, the media and scientific spheres insist on the idea of a crisis, focusing on the excesses and drawbacks of tourism. More broadly, mobility, whether “concrete” (Roche, 2005) or social (Merllie and Prévot, 1991), is being called into question. The ideas of “overtourism”, facilitated by mass transportation, and of social tensions between tourists and locals over resources (water and space, for example) are raised. With the mobility turn (Sheller and Urry, 2006), mobility has become a key notion in the social sciences over the last twenty years and it is now emerging also as a central theme in public debate. All dimensions of the mobility system – i.e., social values, conditions (geographical, economic, political, social), and technologies – are the subject of controversy.

The aim of this call for papers is precisely to re-examine tourist mobilities, from a contemporary or historical perspective, by addressing the techniques and technologies mobilized, the control of travel (border crossings, surveillance of digital traces, etc. ), the evolution of accessibility or inequalities of access, the hybridization with other forms of mobility (leisure, work, migration, etc.), the evolution of moral values associated with modes of transport (for example, the emergence of the flygskam, the shame associated with flying by plane, or tourism as a factor of social differentiation), and so on. To give weight to mobility as a practice, we must understand the experience that individuals may have of it, as well as the conditions of possibility that inform it.

The experience of tourist mobility is first and foremost a practice of places. John Urry (2000) rightly emphasized that mobility, far from being deterritorialized, involves specific, highly integrated infrastructures that form nodes and orchestrate new forms of social life (stations, hotels, airports, etc.). Yet tourists’ experience of the means and places of mobility has received little attention (Johnson, 2010; Larsen, 2001; Mondou and Taunay, 2016; Scuttari, 2021). However, these spaces – both vehicles and infrastructures – are an essential aspect of tourist mobility, for two reasons. First of all, they can be the object of a tourist activity in themselves – think of a cruise or a trip on the Orient-Express. But they are also, more commonly, means of travel or places of passage – increasingly sophisticated, comfortable, and complex to inhabit (e.g., airports) –, where people spend a significant amount of time and which hold a strategic place in any trip. These spaces are no longer mere places of transit, non-places, but places of interactions and experiences. The concept of experience (Decroly, 2015) allows us to apprehend the Individual significance of a practice, its emotional and affective dimension (Bissell, 2010; Jensen et al., 2015): it’s obviously not the same thing to sleep on the ground in an airport blocked by a volcanic eruption as to wait for your flight in an airline lounge, nor is it the same thing to wait for a shared cab on the side of a road as to book a VTC on an app. But this concept also makes it possible to approach the practice of transport tourism as an experiment that is not self-evident, (potentially) problematic, and that requires the mobilization of knowledge and skills. Managing the combination of several modes of transport is a complex affair that requires know-how. Tourist mobilities reveal individuals’ power to act (Lucas, 2018), which is fully a matter of learning or motility (Kaufmann, 2008; Lofgren, 2008; Gaugue, 2012), the analysis of which needs to be pursued and developed.

This call for papers encourages consideration of the tourist experience of mobility spaces: How were these places designed and built, and how did they evolve over time? How are they inhabited by tourists, today as in the past (e.g., tourists’ use of a railway station in the late 19^th century)? What practices do tourists engage in while on the move? How do people deal with the multi-modality of transport? What meaning do they give to the mode of transport they use (the questioning of air travel due to global warming shows that this choice can also be a political consideration)? To do this, we need to grasp the various dimensions of this practice: social interactions, economic trade-offs, political discourse and stances, legal considerations, technological aspects, etc. Proposals developing the investigation of this experience of tourist mobilities by women (Ueckmann, 2020), in non-Western regions of the world (Mondou and Taunay, 2016; Roy and Hannam, 2013), or at other times (Llinares, 2009) are particularly encouraged.

This experience of tourist mobility is also a multi-modal practice. Yet research often focuses on a single mode of transport, with historians particularly interested in the railroad (Blancheton and Marchi, 2011; Conlin and Bird, 2014; Mettetal, 2022) and the automobile (Harp, 2008; Butler and Hannam, 2012; Faugier, 2013; Vilar-Rodriguez and Vallejo-Pousada, 2021). To a certain extent, and for heuristic considerations, tourist mobility was segmented in order to isolate stages and pretend they function autonomously, independently (Bertho-Lavenir, 1999; Mondou and Gay, 2018). In practice, however, a tourist uses several means of locomotion: tourist mobility is based on the use of a succession of modes of transport. Mathieu Flonneau (2012) rightly emphasized the need to understand the link between transport and tourism from a multimodal perspective. It is, therefore, the articulation of these different ways of getting around during a tourist journey, as well as whether or not this is taken into account by the transport operators involved (are they part of a concerted or competitive logic?), that needs to be understood in order to consider the journey as a whole. Understanding the intermodality of tourist mobility remains a knowledge challenge that this call for papers seeks to address.

This approach allows a number of other research questions to be explored: How was this experience of tourist mobility informed by transport operators (companies, associations, clubs)? How did tourism professionals (travel agencies, hotel complexes, tourist guides, publishers) apprehend the mobile experience? In line with recent efforts to develop a history of transport and mobility (Baldasseroni et al., 2022; Guigueno and Flonneau, 2009), another ambition of this issue of Mondes du tourisme is to encourage researchers to (re)question sources (tourist guides, travelogues, transport association magazines, official documents or company archives) in the light of this mobilitarian turn.

Finally, this concept of experience also provides an opportunity to analyse the links between tourist mobility and social mobility. We can make the hypothesis that tourist mobility involves the acquisition of social, cultural and practical resources. These resources take various social forms, which may or may not support social mobilities. What are the social conditions for transforming these resources into capital? To what extent can these resources be mobilized for upward social mobility? When this is the case, how do they relate to the other dimensions of an upward social trajectory? We need to think about the different forms of capital involved in tourist mobility: Which tourist choices (duration, destination, preferred modes of transport, cultural activities envisaged, etc.) align with which budgets? What tourist mobilities are experienced by the new emerging social classes in Asia and especially Africa (Cousin and Réau, 2009; Despres, 2017)? Conversely, what kind of social mobilities exist for societies that receive tourist mobilities (the presential economy)? What about individuals forced to move to supply the tourism industry with labour (Olympic Games, World Cup, etc.) or those who have to leave the territory to make way for tourists (Bidet et al., 2023)? Ultimately, how do tourists fit into the social and spatial fabric of territories and societies?

Article proposals are due by August 31 , 2023, in the form of a 300-word abstract sent to the issue coordinators (etienne.faugier@univ-lyon2.fr; leopold.lucas@univ-littoral.fr). A research seminar will be organized in the autumn (November 2023) with the authors of the selected articles (information will be released on July 17). A first draft of the article will be expected in March 2024 (20,000 to 50,000 characters, see Instructions to authors) for publication of the issue at the end of 2024.