IPrA 2027 Panel: Digital Humanities and Pragmatics in Tourism: Discourse, Data, and the Construction of Tourist Imaginaries

Venue: University of Helsinki, Finland | 27 June - 2 July 2027

Organisers: Ayodele James Akinola, Lindsay Amthor Yotsukura, Frederick John, Simeon Ajiboye

American Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ACIR)

Tourism is rarely a neutral encounter. Digitally mediated tourism discourse is a space where cultural imaginaries, identity, emotion and intentionality are constructed, negotiated, contested, and sometimes weaponized. Representations of places and peoples circulate as hyperreal simulacra; host and guest identities are negotiated under conditions of asymmetry; and antagonism, misrecognition, and polarisation find expression in the seemingly ordinary language of reviews, captions, and platform-curated narratives. This panel takes that contested communicative space as its object of inquiry, bringing Digital Humanities and Pragmatics together to examine how digital tourism discourse both reflects and reproduces broader tensions in cross-cultural understanding.

In direct conversation with the IPrA 2027 conference theme of building bridges and mitigating antagonism, conflict, and polarisation, we ask what role language plays in either deepening or bridging the divides that tourism discourse so often enacts. Online platforms amplify certain voices while marginalizing others, and algorithmic curation shapes which cultural narratives gain visibility. The pragmatics of evaluation, stance, and face-work in reviews and social media further encode attitudes that can reinforce stereotypes or open space for genuine cross-cultural dialogue. Understanding these dynamics requires integrating computational methods with pragmatically informed discourse analysis, and that integration is the methodological commitment that unifies this panel.

Drawing on frameworks from interactional pragmatics, speech act theory, metapragmatic awareness, and critical discourse analysis, and employing methods such as corpus linguistics, sentiment analysis, and semantic network analysis, contributions to this panel will examine how meaning is produced, negotiated, and contested in digital tourism ecosystems. Of particular theoretical interest is the way simulacra and hyperreality (Baudrillard) operate in tourism communication. When destinations are evaluated not against lived experience but against prior representations, the pragmatic act of reviewing becomes a site of image-reproduction rather than authentic exchange, with real consequences for how cultures are perceived and misperceived across difference.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Pragmatic strategies in online travel reviews and ratings
• Computational approaches to tourism discourse analysis
• Digital representations of culture and identity in tourism platforms
• Algorithmic curation and the making of tourist imaginaries
• Multimodal discourse in tourism (text, image, video)
• Hyperreality and contemporary tourism communication
• The pragmatics of tourism and the tourism of pragmatics
• Ethical dimensions of representation in digital tourism discourse
• Construction of emotion and identity in digital tourism discourse
• Intentionality in digital tourism discourse

The panel is designed to accommodate paper presentations and discussion-oriented sessions, fostering methodological exchange and theoretical reflection in equal measure. A minimum of three presentations per 90-minute session is anticipated, with the possibility of extending to multiple sessions depending on the number and quality of submissions.

Our panel is organized under the auspices of the American Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ACIR), a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering interdisciplinary engagement and collaborative knowledge exchange. We welcome submissions from scholars working in digital humanities, pragmatics, tourism studies, communication, and related fields. Established and emerging researchers alike are encouraged to submit, and younger scholars in particular are warmly invited to consider whether their work speaks to this panel's themes.

Useful Links

Submission portal

Call for Papers: https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2027

Conference site: https://pragmatics.international/page/IPC20Helsinki

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