World Craft Series: Travel, Tourism, Translation and Communication

The last decades of the twentieth century have seen the emergence of new disciplines, as research has been focusing on trans-disciplinarity and cross-cultural studies. In the interrelation between 'crafting worlds' and translational issues, however, there are interstices and 'contact zones' that are still unexplored and neglected. Such cases and episodes account for the dynamics of power and ideology in the way the world is crafted through words and in the way spaces are described, possessed, and eventually destroyed.

The World Craft Series provides a niche series on travel, tourism, and translation claiming to bridge the existing gaps through a critical approach to the representation of spaces and places in different languages and cultures. The critical approach contextualizes accounts and descriptions juxtaposed with native traditions and identities through verbal and visual representations. It highlights the destruction of symbolic spaces as consequence of colonization and the surge of global tourism.

The constant fil rouge correlating the research projects and titles of the World Craft Series is the question of translation and translatability, seen in its multi-faceted aspects. The issue is addressed and challenged in its ambiguity through interrelated topics and themes. These include the ‘translation’ of the world in terms of interpretation and cultural adaptation (and manipulation), a translation that is as much textual as inter-linguistic, which likewise accounts for further intertextuality and diffusion (or distortion, plagiarism) of the knowledge of spaces and places. This translation as interpretation is thus enacted within the dynamics of space perception, re-enacted in the writing of the world, linguistically translated into other languages, and eventually adapted through multi-modality. There is also the constant historical function and role of mediators, guides, and go-betweens, whether implied and invisible or institutionally relevant and assertive.

The series projects include early records and first images and discoveries, featuring explorations, conquests, settlements to global tourism, and advertising (both verbal and visual imagery). Drawing from the instruments of cultural geography and socio-semiotics, these are described as perceived and progressively subject to ideological shifts in perspective.

The World Craft Series stems from recent trends in travel writing and translation in the frameworks of colonial and postcolonial research in topo-dynamics and variation in its iconography. The concept note of the series is to counteract the progressive erosion of local cultures and identity versus sustainable tourism.

The series aims to offer cutting-edge research on the topics of travel, tourism, translation, advertising in a multidisciplinary perspective and interconnecting frames and formats for each title within the series. It is intended for postgraduate and doctoral students, as well as researchers in the humanities and social sciences.