In recent years, several policies have increasingly considered smart technologies as a potential solution to overcome territorial marginality in rural areas, where digitalization and smart innovation could help local communities address challenges such as depopulation and socio-economic deprivation. At the European scale, the Smart Village Action was launched in 2017 to address the so-called "circle of decline", showing to what extent rural smartness has been recently gaining momentum in transnational cohesion policies. This work aims to critically explore the Smart Village paradigm as a recently-emerged policy framework in rural, cohesion and/or recovery policies, investigating if and how it is variously (re)interpreted in policies and operationally applied in projects. From a methodological point of view, a qualitative policy document analysis (QPDA) and software-based content analysis were carried out on UE official documents, offering new theoretical insights and operational recommendations for understanding the concept of smartness beyond urban-centered perspectives.

This paper aims at scrutinizing the role of two overlapping dimensions in tourism geography teaching and learning: the real-world perspective, represented by the fieldwork as a long-established practice in geographical teaching; and the digital sphere, namely the use of visual methodologies and social media as tools to activate city image-making in tourist practices.

In particular, the work deepens critical aspects and potentialities of a mixed-method approach combining both traditional methods and more innovative tools to carry out researches and teaching in the field of tourism geography and cultural heritage. Theoretically inserted at the interplay among tourism, digital geography and visual methods, it draws on a series of workshops organized with third-level students between 2016 and 2018. Although problematizing some crucial conceptual issues related to the role of visualities and new technologies, findings highlight the didactic effectiveness of mixed methods that entail the more traditional ones such as team working and fieldworks, and the most innovative such as visual methods and social media, to increase students' interest in geography learning and stimulating their own perceptions of ordinary landscapes through a gaze repositioning.