CATS will hold the Tourism Online Forum Series (TOFS) vol.59 on Thursday, November 13. Anyone is welcome to attend. We look forward to your participation.

Illuminating Collective Memories, Communities and Tourism: A Plasmatic Perspective

Abstract:
Drawing on cases from Indonesia, Singapore and the Netherlands, this talk adopts a ‘plasmatic perspective’ (Ong, 2023) to discuss the ways in which collective memories feature in the making of communities and tourism. Rather than structures, networks or fluidities, plasmatic thinking sees the world as composed of ‘plasmas’ – ‘charged’ sociomaterial clustering of objects, humans and the processes between them. Plasmas are a form of charged matter falling outside solid, liquid and gaseous states and metaphorises the fragility and impermanence of sociomaterial situations for plasmas disintegrates when discharged. Specifically, drawing on the concept of ‘luminosity’ in plasmatic perspective, it examines how collective memories and amnesia gather and disrupt imaginings, productions and consumption of specific sites and position these sites as places of attachment, bonding and identification and/or tourism. From cultural parks to leisure spots to refugee and transit camps, this guest lecture will interrogate the power-relations that shape remembering and forgetting and illuminate the contingent nature of these power processes.

Keywords: plasmatic perspective, collective memories, communities, disruption, tourism

Some of the articles upon which this talk is built on:

• Ong, C. E. (2023) Plasmatic Thinking and Tourism: Macao Tourism as 'Plasmatic Modernity', Asia Pacific Viewpoint. https://doi.org/10.1111/apv.12388
• Xu, S. M. & Ong, C. E.(2024) Assembling Tigers, Dragons and Hells: Relational Materialist Geographies of Curated Themed Spaces, Tourism Geographies, 26(7), 1134–1150. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2412551
• Ong, C. E. and Mah, O. B. P. (2021) The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting: Vietnamese Refugees at Singapore's Hawkins Road Camp, Geoforum, 123:36-46.
• Minca, C. and Ong, C. E. (2016) The Power of Space: The Biopolitics of Custody and Care at the Lloyd Hotel, Amsterdam, Political Geography, 52:34-46.
• Ong, C. E., Minca, C. and Felder, M. (2015) The Historic Hotel as ‘Quasi-Freedom Machine’: Negotiating Utopian Visions and Dark Histories at Amsterdam’s Lloyd Hotel and ‘Cultural Embassy’, Journal of Heritage Tourism, 10(2): 167-183.
•  Felder, M., Minca, C. and Ong, C. E. (2014) Governing refugee space: the quasi-carceral regime of Amsterdam’s Lloyd Hotel, a German-Jewish refugee camp in the prelude to World-War-Two, Social Geography, 69:365-375.
• Ong, C. E., Minca, C. and Felder, M. (2014) Disciplined Mobility and the Emotional Subject in Royal Dutch Lloyd’s Early Twentieth Century Passenger Shipping Network, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, online first. doi: 10.1111/anti.12091

Hosted by: Center for Advanced Tourism Studies (CATS), Hokkaido University

Date/Time: Thursday 13 November 2025  |  18:30-20:00 (JST)

Venue: Online (Zoom Webinar)

Language: English

Capacity: 50 persons

Participation fee: Free to join (pre-registration system)

Speaker: Dr. Chin-Ee Ong
Bio:
Professor Chin-Ee Ong is Professor of Cultural and Tourism Management at Macao University of Tourism. He has a range of international and regional academic and research experiences in Europe and Asia and his research and teaching focus on the cultural and creative in tourism and heritage management. In addition to research grounded in the field and the empirical, Prof Ong advances a new theoretical approach he terms, ‘plasmatic thinking’. Plasmatic thinking is aimed at interrogating the contingent and fleeting socio-material environments we live in using and challenges the static and stable view of our material and social worlds. It stresses the need to illuminate the ‘charges’; that initiate and hold social and material situations together. ​Prof Ong serves as Editor-in-Chief for Tourist Studies (Sage Publications, SSCI), Co-Chair for ATLAS Critical Tourism Studies-Asia Pacific and Asia Coordinator and Coordinator for Heritage Tourism and Education Group at the Association of Leisure and Tourism Education (ATLAS).

Moderator: Dr. Meng Qu

Registration:
Please register at the URL below.
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lQ0Z260bQzGrCy0NRcC5cw

Contact:
Hokkaido University, Center for Advanced Tourism Studies (CATS)
online-forum(at)cats.hokudai.ac.jp
*Please replace the (at) part with @.