Spectral Tourism

I have been shockingly bad at posting blogs recently and the excuse I have is that I’ve been really busy with my academic work. One aspect that has taken up my time has been the preparation for a conference on spectral tourism. My contribution was a discussion on the ethics of tourism on an ancient woodland that is vibrant and agentic. For example, if the Western world began to really believe in animism and the more-than-human, how would we treat these entities? I hope to get this published as a paper, but in the meantime, a short snippet is below:

This paper is inspired by my research on collaborations between humans and the plant more-than-human world, including how agency and vitality are experienced and communicated. Of particular interest is the concept of the landscape Genius Loci, interpreted as the ‘spirit of place’, and in this paper, I explore the ethical consequences of undertaking research on a genius loci and how to share the data in a non-harmful way. Unlike Indigenous cultures with long traditions of multispecies kinship, I envisage a dystopian society in which affective natural assemblages, such as woodlands, are transformed into bounded sites of cheap spectral thrills, influencer-driven tourism, commercial commodification, and spiritual manipulation. In this imagined world, a researcher has been granted permission by a landowner to conduct fieldwork on a particularly vibrant woodland assemblage and now needs to navigate the ethical approval process. This paper explores such an application and how, in addition to reducing the risk to human participants, it must also mitigate energetic risk to the Genius Loci. It ponders what one should do if a research output reveals something that could potentially result in greater harm to the assemblage.