Visual mass media, such as film, television and videogames, are continuously creating new diegetic spaces, re-imagining and re-framing landscapes. On screen worlds infuse the experience of actual landscapes. Climbing over the rooftops of Renaissance Florence in Assassin’s Creed is changing the spatial and temporal perspectives of an urban landscape usually experienced from a 21st century street-level; those who travel across Northern Ireland and New Zealand will also move through the fictional worlds of Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings; and at London King’s Cross’ newly established Platform 9 ¾ people are queuing to enter Harry Potter’s magical world by pushing the now famous trolley through a wall.

Visual media infuse previously mundane places with significance that is reinforced by on-site performances and photography, with some sites being particularly highlighted for their ‘instagramability’. Many of these places then adapt to cater to these practices and images in form of marketing and special offers for those who want to travel across the spaces they have encountered on their screens.

This session aims to go beyond the established ‘film-induced tourism’ approach and invites papers from across different disciplines to explore the larger cultural and societal impact of those imaginary geographies and media landscapes. Contributions are encouraged to examine the tangible and intangible changes that imagination and media bring to places and spaces, how online and offline performances are changing, and what theoretical and methodological challenges in researching this phenomenon arise.

Instructions for authors:

We are very flexible and open to the definition of geography and welcome contributions from a wide variety of fields to encourage an inter- and multidisciplinary session.  These include (but are not limited to) Geography, Visual Culture, Heritage Studies, Tourism, Media Studies, etc.

Abstracts should not exceed 250 words and should include up to five keywords.

Please submit your abstracts by 9th February 2019 to Christoph Doppelhofer ([email protected]) and Mike Crang ([email protected]), Durham University. We will then select abstracts for our full session proposal which will be submitted to the RGS in mid-February. We expect to have final confirmation of acceptance by end of March 2019. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions or comments.