Together with Sabine Stach (GWZO Leipzig), Alena Pfoser will be hosting a roundtable discussion at the 2021 Memory Studies Association Conference focusing on intersections between memory and tourism research. The starting point of the roundtable is the recognition that despite a widespread scholarly concern with memory’s flows, tourism as one of the central ways of how mobility is organised and experienced in late modernity remains an underresearched area within memory studies.

Together with leading and emerging scholars working on the intersection of memory and tourism studies, we will discuss discuss conceptual approaches and empirical directions for the study of memory and tourism and bring the two fields into a conversation: How do tourists, tour guides, tourism managers and others in their particular encounters reinforce, alter, or negotiate images of collective pasts? To what extent are the concepts of national, transnational, or global memory – and how they are usually understood in memory studies – appropriate for exploring what is happening in the tourism sector? How can debates in tourism studies enrich memory studies, and vice versa?

Participating speakers: Sybille Frank (TU Darmstadt), Katie Markham (Newcastle University), Jessica Rapson (King’s College London), Daniel P. Reynolds, (Grinnell College) and Brad West (University of South Australia)