Weaving Digital–Physical Realities: Conditional Empowerment in Women’s Smart Tourism

Smart tourism models assume stable user-technology relationships, overlooking how travelers in constrained environments negotiate technology engagement. This constructivist grounded theory study, based on 68 in-depth interviews, examines Iranian women’s smart tourism practices shaped by intersecting political-technical, socio-cultural, and infrastructural constraints. Analysis revealed three interlinked processes: negotiated navigation through safety-filtered digital inspiration; digital-physical weaving integrating online tools with embodied knowledge; and memory crystallization through selective visibility under surveillance. These processes generate conditional empowerment—graduated, context-dependent agency manifesting through functional, psychological, and relational mechanisms. The resulting Digital-Physical Negotiation Framework reconceptualizes technology affordances as objects of negotiation rather than stable action possibilities, extending affordance theory to digitally-mediated constrained contexts. Practically, offline-first design, multi-modal visibility controls, and redundancy-supportive architectures can better serve women navigating multi-layered constraints. The framework’s transferability beyond Iran requires careful empirical calibration.