En forskningsdag med turistforskare
Evenemanget hålls helt på engelska.
Agenda
OPENING: Marianna Strzelecka, KEST
PART I (moderator Marianna Strzelecka)
🕙 10:15–12:00
Lifestyle mobilities: Past, present and future
Prof. Scott Cohen (40 min)
Lifestyle mobilities refers to ways of life oriented around ongoing geographic mobility. A decade ago lifestyle mobilities emerged as a theoretical approach for understanding lifestyles that blur the borders of tourism, work & migration. Some example phenomena that can be considered within a lifestyle mobilities framing include: Vanlife, long-term ocean cruising, grey nomadism, world schooling, lifestyle travel, global nomadism and digital nomadism. This presentation first provides a history of lifestyle mobilities and how it is analytically distinct, before turning to the state-of-the-art in lifestyle mobilities research through a focus on digital nomadism. The presentation’s emphasis is on lifestyle mobilities' relevance for tourism, its infrastructure and politicisation – via geopolitics, geoarbitrage and gentrification, and the need for greater research diversity. Finally, the presentation maps a future research agenda centred on tensions of transitioning out, precarity and emplacement in lifestyle mobilities research.
Intersecting mobilities and the infrastructuring of rural space in energy transitions
Dr. Solène Prince (30 min)
Renewable energy transitions are inherently spatial processes because their infrastructure is embedded in physical landscapes, often in rural areas. Scholars have conceptualized the transformative effects of these transitions on rural space through the materiality of energy infrastructure. However, limited attention has been paid to the infrastructure that enables circulation in renewable energy transitions. Importantly, rural areas accommodate those who build energy infrastructure. Using the lens of ‘infrastructuring’, this presentation examines how the movement of temporary workers transforms the material and community fabric of rural space. Through a case study of wind power development in Sweden, based on interviews with accommodation providers, the presentation explores the entanglements between temporary workers and the local visitor economy. The findings reveal that renewable energy transitions generate ripple effects that enmesh industrial infrastructure with everyday social and economic systems. The presentation conceptualizes wind turbines as nodes within broader infrastructural networks that support community life, offering a novel perspective on how renewable energy transitions are lived and reproduced.
Discussion inviting participants to deconstruct and question contemporary mobilities
LUNCH BREAK
🕛 12:00–13:15
PART II (moderator Solène Prince)
🕐 13:15–15:00
A Two-Pronged Strategy for Sustainable Tourism Development: Marrying Tourist Desire for Prestige, Status, and Novelty with Resident Psychological Empowerment
Prof. B. Bynum Boley (40 min)
Sustainable tourism research often adopts a reductionist approach, isolating discrete aspects of the tourism system such as host communities, traveler cohorts, or transport infrastructure to manage the inherent complexity of the tourism system. This presentation advocates for a systems thinking framework to transcend these silos and address the multifaceted nature of sustainability. Moving beyond traditional "reform-based" interventions that seek to curtail tourist behavior, this talk will present a “low harm hedonism” approach to examine how we can leverage travelers pursuit of prestige, social status, and novelty to psychologically empower local residents. By emphasizing the distinctiveness of a community’s natural and cultural assets, we can foster resident pride while simultaneously fulfilling visitor desires for "social return" and unique experiences without making tourists feel guilt which been shown to be an ineffective way to change behavior.
Integrating two prominent streams of Dr. Boley’s research—the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS) and studies on tourist behavior and “Social Return”—the talk discusses how to create a symbiotic relationship between these two bodies of research. Attendees will gain insights into how destinations can "thread the needle" by developing products that satisfy the substantive needs of residents for self-esteem and agency, while catering to the functional and symbolic rationalities driving modern tourism consumption.
Who Gets the City When? Human Mobility, Urban Wildlife and Coexistence in Informal Green Spaces
Dr. Arash Akhshik (30 min)
Cities are expanding rapidly, producing a growing number of informal green spaces (IGS), temporary and transitional landscapes that emerge between planning cycles, development pressures, and post-industrial transformation. These spaces are often overlooked in formal urban design, yet they increasingly function as sites of everyday mobility, recreation, and informal nature-based tourism where residents and visitors walk, cycle, explore, and encounter urban biodiversity. But do these spaces truly support coexistence between humans and wildlife, or do they represent contested environments shaped by competing temporal rhythms of movement, leisure, and survival?
This seminar explores how time, rather than space alone, structures relationships between humans and wild mammals in informal urban landscapes. Drawing on camera trap research conducted across three informal green spaces in Kraków, Poland (Bagry Ludwinowskie, Campus UJ, and Borek Fałęcki), we examine how wildlife and human mobility patterns overlap, diverge, and adapt across the twenty-four-hour cycle. The study combines AI assisted image processing with ecological temporal analysis to investigate diel activity patterns and quantify temporal overlap between human presence and wildlife activity.
The findings reveal that coexistence in informal green spaces is largely achieved through temporal partitioning rather than spatial separation. Most wild mammals shifted toward nocturnal activity, suggesting behavioral adaptation to human presence and recreational use. However, patterns varied significantly across sites. Some locations exhibited near complete temporal segregation between humans and wildlife, while others showed higher temporal overlap, potentially reflecting wildlife habituation or constraints imposed by spatial configuration and urban pressures. Differences between solar time and clock time analyses further highlight how ecological rhythms intersect with socially structured mobility schedules.
Rather than uniformly functioning as ecological refugia, informal green spaces emerge as dynamic socio ecological arenas where biodiversity, recreation, and urban mobility intersect. The seminar invites participants to reconsider informal green spaces as more than human mobility landscapes shaped by temporal negotiations between species. By bridging urban ecology, mobilities research, and tourism studies, this work raises new questions about how planning and design can support biodiversity sensitive recreation and foster coexistence in rapidly changing cities.
Discussion inviting participants to deconstruct and question contemporary mobilities
CLOSING: Solène Prince, KEST