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Call for Papers Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, Washington, D.C., April 3-7, 2019 Mountain Tourism in a Rapidly Changing World: International Perspectives Organizers: Rudi Hartmann, Marius Mayer, Sanjay K. Nepal Session Description Mountain areas worldwide are often inhabited by marginalized people, and are especially vulnerable due to the impacts of global change. For many predominantly rural and peripheral mountain regions, tourism has become an important source of income and job creation, and social and cultural revival. However, the nexus between tourism and global change in mountain areas shows a Janus face: Tourism is both one of the major drivers of change in these areas, and at the same time it is subject to the consequences of global change, for instance global warming and its repercussions on snow reliability or natural hazards. Thus, mountain tourism is an ideal topic for geographical analysis due to its inherent and complex intermingling of economic, social and environmental factors shaping its experience and influencing its development. In addition to the usual multi-scalar perspective in geography, research on mountain tourism always has to consider the vertical as well as seasonal dimension. Both show often strong influences on tourism development in terms of the range of possible leisure activities. The mountains of the world are nevertheless highly diverse in terms of climate, geomorphology, population, culture, land use, tourism development, etc., and are consequently confronted with a wide array of often completely different problems and trends. For example, if one compares valleys in the Himalayas, the Andes or the European Alps, challenges and opportunities in those valleys are as diverse as their topographic and landscape forms. From a human geography perspective, recent approaches such as resilience, evolutionary economic geography, choice modelling, amongst others, are relevant to mountain tourism issues. This session aims to (a) identifying current international trends in mountain tourism (climate change adaptation, migration and demographic change, changing social and cultural practices connections of ski areas, technology diffusion etc.) and their often intermingling consequences, (b) analyzing disparities in mountain tourism development on different spatial scales and (c) assessing and discussing impacts of mountain tourism development for spatial planning, nature protection, regional economies and local livelihoods. We invite papers focused on the above themes in the context of mountain tourism. Please send your expressions of interest or abstract on or before October 20, 2018, to one of the organizers: Rudi Hartmann (rudi.hartm...@ucdenver.edu); Marius Mayer (marius.ma...@uni-greifswald.de); Sanjay Nepal (sne...@uwaterloo.ca). Abstract submission and conference registration with the AAG are due October 25, 2018. Dr. Rudi Hartmann University of Colorado Denver Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences Denver, Colorado USA Dr. Marius Mayer Institute for Geography and Geology University of Greifswald Germany Dr. Sanjay K. Nepal Department of Geography and Environmental Management University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
