Tourism Geographies Podcast

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2328612AbstractThe spectral geography of the colonial legacy in Bristol is marked by a series of absences from official and tourist narratives about the city. The people and practices of the Atlantic slave trade are part of the historical and contemporary fabric of the city and persist as ever-present spectres. There are significant differences of view that agree with little beyond that the city was a major port of Empire and a significant site in the triangular trade. Bristol is commonly portrayed as a multicultural city with a rebellious spirit and a strong commitment to social justice. This urban imaginary is evident in accounts of the removal of a statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader and philanthropist, during a Black Lives Matter rally in 2020. The now empty plinth of the Colston statue has become a contested, liminal space that sits between disparate interpretations and radically different points in time in terms of social relations. Individual and collective memories and stories about slavery constitute hauntings in a spectral geography of Bristol. Such stories are rarely heard, and the city is thus haunted by the absences of the voices of those enslaved and a lack of knowledge of the role of slavery in the growth and historic prosperity of the city. Little has been done to incorporate such dissonant heritage and so the histories of slavers, slavery, and slaves are not significant themes in tourism marketing, attractions or experiences in the city. This paper demonstrates that a process of coming to terms with difficult heritage and associated hauntings offers significant potential for tourism to contribute to historic and contemporary social justice.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2366488AbstractThe boundaries between tourism and migration are blurry. This blurring has been beneficial for the governments of wealthy countries enabling them to import a large and flexible temporary workforce that can be directed toward regions and industries where there are labour shortages. Such is the case with the Australian Working Holiday Program (AWHP); a historically tourism-focused cultural exchange program that began in 1975. Since the 1990s, the Australian Government has leveraged the AWHP to support several of Australia’s critical industries. This has been achieved through the tweaking of mobility infrastructures that link Working Holiday Makers’ (WHMs) ability to stay in Australia to employment conditions. Such conditions increase precarity among WHMs, directing them towards remote regions and industries where there are evident labour shortages. While these mobility infrastructures significantly benefit Australia’s economy, they result in WHMs being highly vulnerable to exploitation. Such vulnerability is layered with WHMs from less wealthy, non-English-speaking countries facing the highest levels of vulnerability. This study investigates the way mobility infrastructures in the AWHP influence WHMs’ mobilities, as well as how such mobilities are experienced in uneven and unjust ways. There is urgency to interrogate the role that such programs play in contributing to unjust mobilities, and to query the attendant implications for sustainability.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2380321AbstractThis paper focuses on the settler colonial landscapes of tourism in the regional city of Dubbo, Australia. Dubbo is situated on Wiradyuri Country in the Orana region of New South Wales. Focusing specifically on the heritage-listed Old Dubbo Gaol and the Dundullimal Homestead, a former pastoral station, I explicate how these tourist sites offer experiences that normalise settler dwelling and occupation of First Nations Country. The Old Dubbo Gaol and Dundullimal occupy a broader settler colonial landscape where Dubbo is presented historically as ‘empty’ until settlers exploited the town’s ‘natural’ resources. By occluding the relationship between invasion, pastoralism, and Indigenous dispossession, the sites reproduce for visitors settler colonial metanarratives of dwelling. Using Tim Ingold’s notion of taskscape, I show how the tourist sites create taskscapes which invite visitors and consumers to engage in settler forms of dwelling that normalise a settler colonial landscape. Tourist taskscapes consist of the activities and interactions in a heritage site that encourage visitors to take an active role in experiencing place and history. By aligning these experiences and activities to settler narratives and histories, the sites interpellate visitors into the processes of autochthony that were/are used to negate First Nations sovereignties. While these taskscapes are leaky and contain the presence of First Nations in select parts of the heritage sites, the taskscapes dominate heritage tourism and normalise settler colonisation as a feature of place-making that does not require explicit explanation or education.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2304782AbstractThe fast-changing social media landscape have seen a paradigm shift in how we interact with and research space, place and environment in tourism. Social media presents both challenges and opportunities for tourism geographies due to the vast amount of and various data types. This research provides a concise state of the art and critical review of the history of social media research in tourism geographies by identifying the current status quo and research gaps. Accordingly, I highlight several directions for future tourism geographies research including cross-modalities of social media content, semantics and sense of place, technology and artificial intelligence in social media, social media communication, theoretical engagement, ethics and methodological considerations. This review calls for future research to develop innovative interdisciplinary, theoretical, and methodological approaches to advance theories and practices in social media and in relation to tourism geographies.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2386269AbstractRegenerative tourism argues that addressing the current ecological crisis requires inner transformation, referring to changes in people’s mindsets, values, beliefs, and worldviews. Combined, they influence the systems we create and, as such, represent deep levers for systems change. Yet, an in-depth analysis of the inner dimension in the context of regeneration is missing. It is unclear which qualities foster inner development towards regenerative change. Using the concept of leverage points and through a scoping review and thematic analysis of 309 articles on regenerative approaches, regenerative tourism, and the inner dimension of sustainability, this study proposes the Inner Regenerative Development Framework, a whole-person approach constituting aspects of our inner world that enhance our ability to work regeneratively; conceptualised here as Inner Regenerative Development. The framework brings together cognitive, affective, grounded, and holistic aspects of ourselves, encompassing 12 inner leverage points and 85 inner qualities serving as the basis for interventions, a few of which are proposed as starting points for inner-outer transformation. Collectively, these elements highlight the inner domains, capacities, and practices that can be cultivated to support regenerative tourism from the inside out.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2342462AbstractAlongside the growth in the animal-based tourism industry, the volume and diversity of research on related issues has increased considerably over the last half century. The extant literature explores a very broad range of themes on animals in tourism. Several scholars before us have provided useful analyses and summaries of the existing knowledge: the dominant themes; the various research methods used by researchers; the geographic spread of research contexts; and stakeholder roles and perspectives, among other categories. This brief state-of-the-art review, which aims to build on the existing work, is not intended to be exhaustive. Instead of merely rehashing what is addressed in the literature, we identify a few central and emerging debates on animals in tourism in the post-2000 era, organised under three broad categories: (i) human-animal relations (animal ethics); (ii) sustainability in animal tourism; and (iii) the growing influence of social media and its hashtag movements. The conclusion draws attention to some notable gaps in the literature, on which we invite further exploration. These include the opportunities and risks presented by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other technologies; divergent cultural lenses in interpreting the role of animals in tourism; and animals in tourism education curricula. We hope that this review enlivens interest among tourism geographers around these critical areas.