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Tourism Geographies Podcast
“A nation built on coal”: transcalar memory work at the Big Pit
Abstract
Welsh and coal heritage may seem synonymous in the context of Welsh identities. One of seven national museums, Big Pit and its associated memory work reflect and shape the intertwined dynamic discourses of Wales and coal for visitors. We explore these discourses through a mixed methodology, highlighting the changing and transcalar nature of Wales itself, particularly the devolution of the tourism, heritage, and culture sector in 1997 from the UK Government to the Welsh Government. How have the discourses of National Museum Wales and Big Pit shifted in conjunction with devolutionary power transfers? This paper reflects upon the complicated and fluid discourses of Welshness within the museum’s landscapes. Migration, the dialectic of capital industrialization, and the romanticization of the banal activity of work are all central to these discourses at the Big Pit. Transcalar relationships of tourism and heritage fuel and challenge these discourses as the Big Pit sits on the edge of a UK National Park, on the European Route of Industrial Heritage, and as a central institution of the Blaenavon Industrial Landscape UNESCO World Heritage Site. These interscalar and geopolitical relationships of memory, heritage, and tourism emerge from our multisensory analysis and speak to questions echoing across the United Kingdom and other multi-nation states navigating spatial and temporal shifts in the geopolitics of their tourism sectors. All industrial heritage sites navigate national identities in overt and covert ways. The relationships between resources, heritage sites, the state, and visitors shape the landscapes of industrial heritage sites and their embeddedness into community and national narratives. As Big Pit has transitioned from a small industrial heritage site managed by the UK-overseen National Museum of Wales towards a major tourist attraction and equal member of the seven-site Welsh-overseen National Museum Wales, we identify geopolitical shifts in coal and national heritage.
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22. Place agency and visitor hybridity in place-making processes at sacred heritage sites
28:11||Season 3, Ep. 22https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14616688.2024.2443897AbstractThis paper investigates the relational nature of place-making at sacred heritage sites, taking Kyoto, Japan, as a case study to analyse how domestic tourists construct meaning in interaction with the spatial environment. Based on 11 semi-structured online interviews with Japanese spiritual tourists, an in-depth exploration of participants’ interactions with and co-construction of sacred spaces was conducted. The analysis centres on two themes. First, visitors embody fluid, overlapping roles that blend secular and sacred motivations, moving beyond fixed categories of insider or outsider. These hybrid roles reflect the fluidity of visitor identities and intentions in their engagement with sacred sites. Second, the paper highlights the agency of the places themselves in place-making processes. Sacred sites such as Kiyomizu-dera and Fushimi Inari Taisha are not passive backdrops. Rather, they are active participants that shape visitor experiences and interactions through their physical, natural, and sensory affordances in the form of: (1) a bridge to the supernatural; (2) human-made materiality; (3) natural materiality; (4) atmosphere. Consequently, we conclude that a relational understanding of place-making at sacred sites should recognise the complex interplay between the fluid role of visitors and the active agency of the sites, a process in which both human and non-human actors co-construct the meaning and experience of place.21. Religious Tourism
17:46||Season 3, Ep. 21https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2423168AbstractReligiously motivated travel, such as pilgrimages, is one of the oldest forms of tourism. Over the past fifty years, religiously motivated tourism has experienced significant growth. Religious tourism has evolved in diverse contexts and locations, and it is increasingly explored by scholars from various fields. Existing literature on religious tourism suggests a growing diversification of visitors, who are driven by the diminishing significance of traditional religious beliefs in contemporary societies. Scholars have indicated a global decline in engagement with organised religions, possibly attributed to modern scientific knowledge, rational thinking, and secularisation. Consequently, there is a growing trend where individuals travel to religious and pilgrimage sites that hold personal significance or meaning for them. In the post-pandemic context, more attention should be given to the wellness aspects of religious tourism, including the mental, physical, and spiritual health benefits. Religious tourism, especially in developing regions and remote areas, has been viewed as part of economic diversification strategies. To provide pathways for how religious tourism can actually benefit the local community and economy in practice, there is a need for more in-depth research and analysis. More critical research can explore how economic development influences or impacts poverty alleviation, sustainability, accessibility, and environmental impacts. For future research, beyond tourists’ perspectives, more attention on the perspectives of communities and local stakeholders is required. Since Western contexts, conceptualisations, methodologies, and interpretations still dominate the field, it is essential to incorporate holistic perspectives and understandings from a broader body of scholars. Encouraging local scholarship is important to foster more balanced discussions within this field of study. Methodologies should expand and become more creative, moving beyond quantitative studies and incorporating more fieldwork. Scholars need to address practical problems related to religious tourism sites by collaborating with policymakers, tourism operators, local communities, and religious associations.20. Tourism at the end of the world: places to play as kinopolitical constellations
30:31||Season 3, Ep. 20https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2360629AbstractThis commentary reflects on the geopolitical and the kinopolitical intersections of tourist places, performances, and placemaking. All tourism can be said to be geopolitical, as well as kinopolitical. Tourism involves uneven relations of (im)mobilities that are shaped by and shaping of state power, state borders, national identities, and political alliance and conflicts. Geopolitical relations affect who can ‘play’ at being a tourist, where they can play, and how places rise and fall in the geopolitical theatre of desirability, security, and affordability for different types of tourism. Kinopolitical relations affect how these relations play out in actual places and embodied performances. The current inequalities of the global economy foster geopolitically uneven tourism constellations, with crucial societal and ecological impacts that are the core question of the future of tourism within a system of kino-geopolitics.19. Destabilising the home: place making, dark tourism and the spectral
21:33||Season 3, Ep. 19https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2412547AbstractGhosts, hauntings and the spectral are intrinsically linked to sites of dark tourism. Supernatural stories commonly emerge in places connected with tragedy, death and the macabre, forming spectral geographies in which the past and present intertwine. Visiting places of supernatural significance has long been of interest to tourists (Holmes and Inglis, 2004), however, in the last two decades a considerable ‘ghost-hunting’ subculture has emerged alongside commercial events and tourist attractions dedicated to engaging visitors with spectral possibilities (Eaton, 2020; Ironside, 2018). As a result, places associated with ghost folklore including private homes, hotels, and heritage buildings, have become popular travel destinations due to their supernatural associations. Film and television media are often credited with the popularisation of haunted places (Edwards, 2019; Hill, 2010); however, more recently web-based and social media platforms have become spaces for promoting, reporting, and sharing paranormal experiences. In this paper, we explore the construction of spectral geographies, specifically haunted houses, through online narratives. By drawing upon textual analysis of both marketing and online reviews we analyse two cases, 30 East Drive and The Ancient Ram Inn, and explore how these private homes have been transformed into sites of dark tourism through digital storytelling and discourse. Through our analysis we consider how personal experience, intertextuality, and uncanny signifiers contribute to a form of placemaking through digital media and storytelling (Halegoua & Polson, 2021), experiential consumerism (Pine & Gilmore, 2011) and an evolving spiritual quest culture (Eaton, 2015).18. Toward a critical geopolitics of smart tourism
35:16||Season 3, Ep. 18https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2360633AbstractThis brief commentary develops an argument for a critical geopolitics of smart tourism. Several critical geopolitical issues related to smart tourism deserve more attention in tourism studies, including the digital infrastructuralization of tourism in the context of platformization and data governance geopolitics. The commentary focuses on smart tourism as a new paradigm in digitally mediated tourism, one which shifts the conversation regarding the digital geographies of tourism from controlling the transboundary flow of digital information to controlling physical spaces that have themselves become digitally platformized. The commentary also focuses on China as a paradigmatic site of smart tourism development and promotion. Here, the geopolitical issues swirling around smart tourism can be seen quite clearly. The commentary concludes with the observation that the digital infrastructuralization of tourism introduces not just a new layer of geopolitical issues to account for in the tourism encounter with places, but also technopolitical effects that also shape that encounter in important ways.17. Tourism geopolitics: roots and branches
17:19||Season 3, Ep. 17https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2332354AbstractThis paper critically reviews tourism geopolitics’ lifespan with a focus on both recent developments and its longer history. Contemporary times show increased attention paid by geographers to tourism geopolitics. This work follows more intensive global cross-border leisure travel underpinned by strong expressions of nationhood. The everyday geopolitical dimensions of tourism reverberate across scales and inform diplomacy, international relations, border controls, and shifting regional alliances. Yet there is a longer intellectual history to tourism geopolitics. This review attends to a few of the concept’s origins in tourism geography.16. Popular culture and tourism: conceptual advances and future directions
26:33||Season 3, Ep. 16https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2412552AbstractThis review of the intersection between popular culture and tourism surveys progress in the field and suggests directions for future research. Popular culture as fuel for niche tourism, interpreted in relation to nostalgia, authenticity, and identity, has been supplemented by research on embodiment and performativity, and the influence of social media. Popular culture remains a strong rationale for travel and is thoroughly imbricated in tourism’s corporatised and platformised industry superstructure. Yet, as subcultures and social media proliferate globally and are refracted by cultural diversity and a more disruptive world, research will need to adapt accordingly, linking structural analysis of industry consolidation, cyclicality, and fluidity, with critical cultural theories in order to pluralise, diversify and contest understandings of popular culture and its connection to tourism.15. A critical reflection on tourism geopolitics: research progress and future agenda
17:02||Season 3, Ep. 15https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2366481AbstractTourism and geopolitics are intrinsically linked. However, current studies on the geopolitical facets of tourism are insufficient. This article first reflects on the diversified understandings of geopolitics and how these different interpretations are reproduced in existing tourism geopolitics scholarship. We then elucidate the multiple complicated and intimate entanglements between tourism and geopolitics and highlight the often underestimated geopolitical agency of tourism. Following this, we evaluate the state of the extant research on this topic. Finally, we suggest three directions for future research: (1) deepening theorisation and operationalisation, (2) attending to agency, mechanism, and non-state actors, and (3) adopting a spatially sensitive perspective. In summary, we argue that further conjoining the relatively isolated tourism and geopolitics terrain benefits both disciplines of tourism geography and political geography, and calls for the development of innovative interdisciplinary, theoretical, and methodological approaches to advance the field.14. Pragmatic arguments for decolonising tourism praxis in Africa
40:35||Season 3, Ep. 14https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2335955AbstractThis conceptual essay extends decolonisation debates to the broader context of decoloniality of praxis. It acknowledges the significance of epistemological and pedagogical decolonisation but argues that these do not fully engage with the entrenched coloniality in tourism in Africa. The essay problematises the conventional explanations for Africa’s underperformance in international tourism and its erasure of Africans as tourists. It proffers pragmatic arguments for decolonising tourism in Africa, given the unprecedented decline in international tourism during the Covid-19 pandemic, the historically contradictory images of Africa, the latent demand for domestic and regional tourism, the youthful population of Africa, and the possibility of Africa-wide freedom of movement emanating from implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area. The article emphasizes the need for concomitant representivity of Africans as producers and consumers of tourism experiences from within the continent, partly facilitated through principles of subsidiarity, although potential resistance to such a pursuit is acknowledged.