Conference proceedings EATSA 2024 GERMANY 09-12 July 2024 Europe, Germany, Karlsruhe, Karlshochschule

As our society changes rapidly in the face of digital imperatives, environmental concerns and social upheavals, we need to pose new questions to reflect on diversity, value, growth and transformation in this emergent global world order. This EATSA 2024 Germany conference assembles academics and practitioners from different backgrounds in tourism, culture and mobility research and practice to work within a narrative space to create a dialogue and ask – what is Europe? Why is Europe the most visited region on the planet? What are the imaginations that construct this idea of Europe? How do key cultural institutions and ritual practices such as food, religion and sports (and specifically football in this conference) contribute towards the making of European identity. ‘Picture Europe’ provides a framework for imagining Europe and the ‘West’ based on othered perspectives in which agency is given to tourists to reconstruct and narrativize spaces in the European city. Their stories, our stories – coerce a rethink of culture as reflexive, embodied and contingent especially in our era of multifarious transnational mobilities. The conference will collect othered stories to render Europe with novel gazes and map spaces of engagement which encourage the creation of platforms for continuous dialogue on what Europe could mean for different voices.Unlike other conferences in which delegates present their research on a topic, this conference serves as a reflexive thinktank to research, collect, discuss insightful experiences. Participants will situate themselves as part of a European lifeworld and cultural landscape to embody place – Denkbilder – sculpting the form, content and image of one’s reflections. They are invited to explore place meanings in the city – how they are imagined, represented and consumed by interrogating events, buildings, sculptures, food, paintings, novels, films and music – all in search of the lived experience of places and the dynamic everyday life. In so doing, the conference will elucidate the diegetic quality of personal experiences and encounters in understanding different meanings of Europe through variegated spaces of consumption, not only in physical locations, but the underlying processes in which the imagination takes place.