The nexus of travel and cinema has been explored in complex ways, much of it premised on the assumption of a shared visual culture between the two and the understanding that travel as a practice and concept forms the very core of representations and narratives (Marin 1993). Travel and tourism have been key to the development of the moving image (Beeton 2015) and travel films one of the first profitable global genres (Findlay 2019). Inquiries at the intersections of travel and cinema have also been based on a consideration of the emergence on the one hand of mass tourism and of cinema as mass entertainment on the other as parallel phenomena mediated by technological innovations of the twentieth century. Attention to travel-cinema connections can help understand the co-constitutive relationship between being in place  and out of place, dwelling and travelling, local and global, in meaning-making. Research on travel and the related themes of migration and diaspora in cinema has addressed questions about representations of mobility, borders, and identity in an increasingly interconnected yet unequal and fragmented world. It has also attended to cinema’s influence on travel as in "film-induced tourism" and "cinematic-travel" (Beeton 2015) to explore the mediation/mediatization of gaze, the affective connections audiences feel toward places portrayed in films, and the role of ideology, politics, and psychology in shaping these. The rapid development of digital media and media platforms in the twenty-first century has made this relationship even more complex and arguably more interdependent. 

Approaching travel as a physical act and a concept, and responding to changes in film making and film watching in the current digital landscape, this seminar seeks to explore these and other interconnections. Guiding questions include: How are current innovations in digital media and media platforms shaping the relationship between travel and cinema? What are the effects of current and recent cinematic representations of people and places on travel? What are the implications of such investigations for understanding local-national-global interactions in our time? What theoretical and methodological approaches can be brought to and emerge from these and related investigations?

We invite papers on topics that include, but are not limited to, the following:

Travel, cinema, and new media

Border crossing, nation-state, and cinema

Cinema and the local

Diaspora, travel, and cinema

Travel, cinema, and stereotypes 

Cinema and urban travel 

Spectator and flâneur

Travel, cinema, and gaze

Film-induced travel

Road movies

Travel and documentaries 

Travel, cinema, space, time

Virtual travel