Högre seminariet i kulturgeografi

Date                      

Topic

Speaker

October

16 October
13:15-15:00

Gothenburg as a gateway city, yesterday, today and tomorrow

How has Gothenburg as a gateway changed and what opportunities and risks are there for the future? In this presentation, there will be an introduction to how the concept of "gateway" has been used in historical research and how it can be applied to the city of Gothenburg.

Per Hallén

23 October
13:15-15:00
A252

Tourism workers – shaping just labour geographies or being unjustly shaped by tourism?

This presentation will take some recent theorizations of justice in geography (Przybylinski, 2021; Mitchell 2023), and ongoing debates in labour geography on constrained labour agency (Coe & Jordhus-Lier, 2011; 2023) as its point of departure to explore and discuss tourist spaces in terms of fairness and equity, as well as how and under what conditions workers are able to shape more just labour geographies. I will argue that tourist spaces are imbued with uneven power relations and social injustices, as reflected for instance in the relationship between paying tourists and paid (feminized and racialized) labourers; the systematic and persistent undervaluation of many tourism jobs and skills, and tourism workers, who perform work for the social reproduction of others, but who concurrently face difficulties reproducing themselves due to factors such as low pay rates and rising costs of living. I will conclude by making a few suggestions as to what a more just tourism landscape would look like, and by proposing that labour agency (in pursuit of more just labour geographies) is not constrained but conditioned by the coming together of specific socio-spatial circumstances. ‘Successful’ or not, labour agency depends on geographical timing.

November