Message from 1st Vice President

RIOJA 2009 UPDATE

Dear Academy Fellows,

As approved at our Conference in Turkey the program for the Rioja meeting will have a number of innovations. Some of them are addressed more in-depth in other sections of this Newsletter and will be in future issues. However, here I want to draw your attention to what we have up-to-now called our General Discussion Session (GDS).

One of the things some of us missed in the past was a more open discussion of some subjects that might interest most of our Fellows. Our scientific sessions, valuable as they are (as a matter of fact, they will be the fundamental part of the Rioja conference as they were in past editions), take us from one area of knowledge to another following the order in which the papers are presented. In this way, we miss the opportunity of collective thinking on issues of general interests.

GDS is a first attempt to improve our work. The idea has to be credited to Geoff Wall, Dick Butler and Allan Williams who, a few weeks ago, addressed the Exec Committee with a proposal to present a joint paper on Indigenous Tourism. They also suggested that their paper might be followed by other points of view and we all agreed on that. Julio Aramberri, Bill Gartner and David Harrison accepted to be the discussants. Once the first team paper is completed, they will prepare their own additional or alternative points of view in another paper. Both position papers will be distributed to fellows ahead of the Conference so that everybody can be ready to participate in the discussion.

As broad and collective debate is the goal of this new item, the session format has been conceived in a way to make it possible. Not only will the position papers be distributed before the conference; they will be presented within a limited time frame. The proponents of the first paper will have 15 minutes to recap their views. Discussants will have to be even shorter, as they are allotted just 10 minutes for comments. After that, the moderator will open a general discussion for 45-50 minutes, followed by his own summary of the debate in the last 10 minutes.

I do not say “his own summary” out of a some sexist prejudice. The name of Jafar Jafari was first circulated and then approved by all the intervening parties (including himself) to do the job for this particular conference. Hopefully, in future editions we will be able to refer to “her own summary” when we talk about the moderator.

This is, in a nutshell, the initial idea for GDS. We will try to perfect it as time goes by and we will keep all o you informed about new developments. Any suggestions to this end will be welcome.

Best regards,

Julio Aramberri