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2024-2025 Colloquium Series
Moving Without Going. Going without Moving:
The Paradox of Tourist Subjectivity in the Digital Age
(Reading with Olga Tokarczuk and Thinking about Time Traveling)
Dennis Jiayang Song
Undergraduate, University of California, Berkeley
Friday, November 22, 4PM-6PM PDT
Hybrid Presentation
In Person: Gifford Room, 221 Anthropology and Art Practice Bldg.
University of California, Berkeley
On Zoom: [click here] *
Please join us for dinner and further conversation at
the Great China Restaurant, Bancroft Avenue, Berkeley (6:15pm).
RSVP required for dinner. Please e-mail graburn@berkeley.edu
*There is no password needed to join this meeting.
However, please ensure that you are logged into your Zoom account
before clicking on the meeting link.
Abstract
This talk theorizes a difference between going and moving. Consider a stereotypical family road trip. The car and the family themselves become the sole destination. This distinction provides a valuable framework for thinking about the future of tourism practices. It redirects our focus to the difference between "Inner and Outer Journeys in Tourism" (Graburn, 2012). We begin to see that tourists can travel to multiple places at once: they may be physically going to Beijing, but their journey may actually take them back in time, to memories of family moments in front of the TV during the 2008 Olympics. Tourism theory currently faces a predicament, where the “economist” side of the social theorist–project planner dual identity of the tourism scholar consistently uses social theory as a step-by-step guide on “How to Exploit the Emotional Vulnerabilities of Alienated Tourists 101.” Distinguishing between going and moving helps bridge this rift by creating tourist profiles that do not rely on cultural capital tied to physical mobility toward "authentic" sites, static in time. Recognizing the difference between moving and going becomes a Freudian moment—a realization that we constantly time travel. Can we embed this exact feeling into project developments? Perhaps one day, tourist destinations will cease to be physical arrivals at external authenticity. Perhaps tourism will become the art of building a room of one’s own, a space you carry with you wherever you move. Perhaps, one day, tourists will feel at ease for precisely never truly going somewhere, never truly arriving.
Speaker Bio
Dennis Jiayang Song is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, double majoring in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM) and Rhetoric. His research interests are wide-ranging, covering topics such as tourism and health (e.g., alcoholism, mental health improvements), science and technology studies (e.g., TikTok), and exploring the "self" as a way of knowing. He grew up in Kunming (Yunnan, China), Toronto, and Vancouver (British Columbia). His favorite flower is the yellow buttercup, and his name means “the good sun” in Chinese.
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