Call for Papers: After Dark – Exploring Nighttime Tourism in Tourism Geographies (Special Issue)

Guest Editors:
Dr. Manuel Garcia-Ruiz (ISCTE–IUL, Portugal)
Coordinator of the International Night Studies Network
Manuel_Ruiz@iscte-iul.pt
Dr. Jordi Nofre (NOVA FCSH, Portugal)
Coordinator of the LXNIGHTS Research Group
jnofre@fcsh.unl.pt
Overview
This special issue foregrounds the night as a central analytical lens in tourism geographies.
Tourism studies have traditionally privileged daylight practices, leaving after-dark experiences underexplored. Yet, the night increasingly hosts a wide range of touristic and cultural activities—from light art festivals and open-air concerts to night markets, gastronomic trails, religious vigils, night diving, night safaris, and stargazing events.
These nocturnal experiences intersect with processes of urban regeneration, aesthetic commodification, seasonality management, and the production of distinctive affective atmospheres and rhythmic patterns of tourism destinations. By focusing on the night, this issue contributes to recent calls for greater attention to temporalities, atmospheres, and embodied practices in tourism research, highlighting how nocturnal cultural production reshapes tourist imaginaries, mobilities, and policies.
We invite scholars to engage with the full range of night-related tourism forms, including but not limited to:
- Cultural tourism: nighttime museum openings, live music, theatre;
- Creative tourism: participatory performances, artistic interventions after dark;
- Gastronomic tourism: food trails, night markets, culinary or wine festivals;
- Event-based tourism: light and music festivals, film nights;
- Religious and spiritual tourism: pilgrimages, vigils, nocturnal ceremonies;
- LGBTQI+ tourism: queer nightlife, raves, safe spaces;
- Wellness tourism: thermal baths, full-moon yoga, nocturnal meditation;
- Nightlife and party tourism: clubbing, beach parties, festival circuits;
- Astrotourism: observatories, dark-sky reserves, northern lights;
- Night diving and safaris: underwater or wildlife experiences after dark.
These practices unfold across urban, coastal, insular, rural, and mountain destinations, offering fertile terrain for comparative, critical, and interdisciplinary reflection on the multiple and multidimensional relationships between tourism and the night.
Theoretical Background and Research Context
Over the past decade, the nighttime leisure economy has become crucial for place branding and tourism-oriented strategies. Beyond the global circuit of nightlife destinations, astrotourism, night diving, religious rituals, and light festivals have emerged as significant assets of the “after dark” economy.
Tourism geographers and urban scholars have increasingly examined how nightlife and tourism reshape the social and spatial fabric of cities (Nofre et al., 2018; Tomasella, 2023), exposing tensions between heritage, everyday life, and urban liveability. Concepts such as night governance (Seijas & Gelders, 2021; Roberts, 2006) have gained traction to address these tensions, while the COVID-19 pandemic underscored the precarity of nightlife economies (Aramayona, 2025).
At the core of many urban strategies lies the aestheticization of the night, exemplified by light festivals (Giordano & Ong, 2017; García-Ruiz, 2024a, 2024b) and their emotional, cultural, and political implications. These processes resonate with broader debates on aesthetic capitalism (Lipovetsky & Serroy, 2015) and the enrichment economy (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020).
The affective and embodied experience of night tourism has also become a key research frontier. Drawing from affect theory (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Bissell, 2010) and rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004; Edensor, 2010), scholars have shown how nighttime tourism reorganizes emotions, perceptions, and collective rhythms in cities.
Recent syntheses (García-Ruiz & Nofre, 2024) propose the night as a terrain of aesthetic, political, and economic negotiation—revealing both its imaginative power and its socio-spatial contradictions in contexts of gentrification, touristification, and environmental change.
Methodological Scope
The special issue encourages diverse and rigorous methodological contributions, including but not limited to:
- Qualitative ethnographies of nighttime events or spaces (e.g., light festivals, clubbing, stargazing);
- Urban, environmental, and policy analyses of nocturnal governance and light pollution;
- Mixed methods combining interviews, surveys, observation, and media analysis;
- Spatial Big Data and GIScience applied to tourist flows or illumination patterns;
- Comparative research across geographical, cultural, or political contexts;
- Visual and sensory ethnography capturing atmospheres, soundscapes, and lighting.
We also welcome action-research and quadruple-helix approaches aimed at fostering sustainable, inclusive, and resilient night-time tourism in the face of the current global tourism polycrisis.
[Extended CFP can be found here: https://www.tgjournal.com/after-dark-nighttime-tourism.html]
Guidelines & Timeline
We anticipate including a range of paper types—Research Articles, Commentaries, and State-of-the-Art Review Papers—in accordance with Tourism Geographies’s editorial standards.
Provisional Schedule:
- Call for Papers Launch: June 2025
- Abstract Submission Deadline: November 15, 2025
- Notification of Acceptance: December 15, 2025
- Full Paper Submission Deadline: March 15, 2026
- Peer Review Period: March–August 2026
- Revised Papers Due: September 2026
- Online First Publication: from October 2026 onward
- Final Special Issue Publication: Late 2026 / Early 2027
Paper Types and Lengths
Tourism Geographies publishes the following manuscript types:
- Research Articles (max. 7,500 words):
Theoretically grounded studies addressing a conceptual or methodological problem, often based on case study fieldwork. - Commentaries (max. 2,000 words):
Short papers offering critical or theoretical reflections that engage with key debates in tourism geographies. - Forum Issues (max. 4,000 words each):
Thematic clusters of short research articles on timely topics, coordinated by guest editors. - State-of-the-Art Review Papers (max. 9,000 words):
Conceptually oriented papers that review and advance the theoretical evolution of key ideas in tourism geographies.
All word counts include abstract (max. 300 words), keywords, tables, figures, and references.
Publication Criteria
Submitted manuscripts should:
- Clearly articulate their relevance to tourism geographies;
- Demonstrate methodological rigor and coherence;
- Provide conceptual and theoretical contributions beyond descriptive case studies;
- Engage with existing scholarship, including work previously published in Tourism Geographies;
- Be well structured and written to a high academic standard.
Submission and Author Guidelines
Authors must follow this two-step submission process:
- Abstract submission to the Guest Editors:
Authors must submit their abstracts (max. 300 words) directly to the Guest Editors via email (see contact details above).
The editors will conduct a thorough review of all abstracts and select those that best fit the scope and objectivesof the special issue. - Invitation to submit full papers:
Only the authors whose abstracts are formally accepted by the editors will be invited to prepare and submit their full manuscripts through the Tourism Geographies online submission system for external peer review.
For full details on manuscript formats, structure, and submission procedures, please consult the official author guidelines at:
https://www.tgjournal.com/notes-for-authors.html
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Manuel Garcia-Ruiz (June 19, 2025). Call for Papers: After Dark – Exploring Nighttime Tourism in Tourism Geographies (Special Issue). International Night Studies Network. Retrieved December 12, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/145se
