Alena Pfoser presented a paper entitled “Communicating contested pasts in tourism encounters: the case of Russian tourism to the ‘near abroad’ ” at the MeCCSA conference at the University of Brighton on 10 January 2020. The paper focused on different strategies tour guides use to talk about shared pasts between Russia and the host city and analysed geopolitical and ideological consequences of these memory practices. The paper brought together literature on memory studies and tourism studies and argued for the need to scale up the analysis of tourism encounters and conceive them multi-scalar experiences that reproduce, refract and challenges wider discourses and ideologies of people and place.