Symposium Theme

The theme for the 31st Nordic Symposium on Tourism and Hospitality Research is Rethinking tourism for a sustainable future. In line with this, the aim of the symposium is to share, discuss and advance science-based ideas and approaches that can transform contemporary crises into opportunities. The quest of conceptualizing and practicing alternative forms of sustainable tourism has never been greater. On one hand, almost every region in the world relies on tourism, for economic reasons. On the other hand, many of the same regions are seriously suffering from either too much or too little tourism (e.g., Venice, Italy; vs. Vännäs, Sweden), unprecedented disruptions associated with social precarization, climate change, and an increased exposure to a globalized economic system affected by financial-market speculation, political destabilization, seats of war, and a pandemic (Covid-19).

In line with the UN-Sustainable Development Goals, the conference’s scientific focus is to add to the still little advanced research aiming at exploring tourism’s potentials to transform untenable realities within the socio-economic and ecological spheres towards more sustainable future paths, especially in the Nordic context.

The symposium invites scholars from the Nordic countries and beyond to share their academic insights, and projections associated with the evolving field of transformative tourism. A transformative tourism science re-thinks and proposes alternatives for conventional ways of scientific reasoning which in the past too often have damaged the power of moral imagination, thus hampered the visioning of tourism’s contribution to a truly sustainable world.  

With the theme of Rethinking tourism for a sustainable future, we seek to address topics in the Nordic context such as (but not exclusive to):

• Incidents of sustainable world-creation through tourism where empowered communities, place prosperity and meaningful work is prominent
  
  
• Sustainable institutional arrangements where governance can be a source of creativity and social innovation for the maintenance of public goods, commons and welfare
  
  
• Tourism business, entrepreneurs and economic rethinking for a responsible, ethical and spiritual leadership
  
  
• Responsible tourist behavior and transformative experiences with learning and behavioral change
  
  
• Critical ontology, epistemology & ethics in tourism science