CFP: Travel and Tourism (Mid-Atlantic Popular American Culture Association)
Conference: Mid-Atlantic Popular American Culture Association
New Brunswick, New Jersey
November 4-6, 2005
June 15, 2005
The annual MAPACA conference features roughly 90 interdisciplinary panels on a wide range of topics. We plan to run several panels on Travel and Tourism.
The Travel and Tourism panels encourage a wide range of presentations, papers, and multi-media displays about travel and tourism. The following is a general list of suggested topics, but other topics and queries are certainly invited.
Since travel writing appears in so many forms--novels and movies, fictions and non-fictions and meta-fictions, cartoons and websites, journalism and photo essays, advertisements and business reports, guide books and maps, reality TV and virtual reality--please feel free to consider a very wide range of materials and texts. These trips might take one anywhere from Disneyland to Holocaust memorials, from the Walt Whitman house to the top of Everest, from Grand Tours to forbidden countries, from personal misadventures to trips of a lifetime. These travels often challenge our assumptions about allegedly simple terms, such as tourist, traveler, map, picturesque, vulgar, forbidden, exile, pilgrimage, exotic, border--and many others.
I am also planning to organize two special panels. The first, "Traveling with Big Brother," would focus on security and privacy issues involving travel and tourism. The second, "Traveling with Little Brother/Sister," would focus on families and travel.
Please feel free to send questions or notes to Gene McQuillan, the Travel and Tourism chair, at Genekcc@aol.com. An abstract of 250-500 words is required by June 15, 2005.
