After the completion of the film fan tourism project last year, I had an opportunity to co-organize a workshop for the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia on tourism culture with Dr. Sirijit Sunanta. The workshop's aim is to invite scholars in our network to collaborate on a special issue journal for Journal of Languages and Cultures. The event started with a bit of technical issue as we had problem with our Zoom account and had to migrate to Web-ex. All went fine in the end. It was a real pleasure to get a chance to meet virtually two scholars whom I have read and cited their works, Mary Mostafanezhad, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Sangkyun Kim, Edith Cowan University, Australia. A wide range of papers were presented highlighting new directions of interdisciplinary tourism culture research. This includes work on visual and sonic ethnography that explores the impact of tourism to a local community, work on dark tourism and different (and often conflicting) forms memorialization of WWII memories in Thailand, ethnic tourism and its complicated dimensions, and the role of digital culture in local tourism promotion.

The papers presented at the workshop will be published around July 2023.