Tourism Geographies Podcast

https://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).

https://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.

https://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.

https://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.

https://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.

https://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.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2387212AbstractThis article examines tourism as an everyday geopolitical project. Following feminist, queer, Black, Caribbean and Latin American contributions to the critical analysis of tourism geographies, it turns the attention to tourism’s capacity to produce and reinforce uneven geographies, recreate colonial relations, and catalyze racialized and gendered dispossession. In doing so, it insists on the violent geographies of tourism and their sedimentations in everyday life.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2325943AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic, environmental crisis and increasing growth in tourism prompted interest in more responsible tourism. So called responsible tourism (RT) entails diverse ingredients and an aim of this research is to understand if residents of community owned nature-rich land believe they have responsibility to share with visitors, or if their focus is shifting toward prioritising environmental conservation and or personal wellbeing. In this case study a unique perception of RT emerges in Knoydart Scotland, born from a pronounced awareness of biocultural heritage and a self-directed understanding of landscape as cultural. A distinctive feature in this case study is an expression of abundant generosity evolving from participants’ embodied understanding of the integration of culture and nature. This commitment to a cultural landscape is particularly noteworthy since it is set within a location presented to tourists as ‘wilderness’. Findings suggest that it is meaningful to explore historically evolved cultural understandings of ‘islandness’ and biocultural heritage, before promoting exogenous RT strategies. This research revitalizes frequently discredited notions about what responsible and sustainable tourism involve, as well as offering a rare example of the impacts of ‘islandness’ within a mainland setting.

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.