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Tourism Geographies Podcast
Bordering, ordering and othering through tourism: the tourism geographies of borders
Season 1, Ep. 35
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https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2023.2291818
AbstractThe interplay between borders and tourism has fascinated tourism geographers for decades. However, only recently has tourism geographies research on borders mirrored border studies by interweaving tourism with its spatial, cultural, political and economic embedding in order to understand tourism’s socio-spatial place-making and bordering effects. We utilize the highly influential framework for border studies of van Houtum and van Naerssen to reflect on the state of the art of the tourism geographies of borders and make sense of recent developments in the field. The framework focused on the bordering, ordering and othering of society and space, referring, in turn, to creating a sense of boundedness, a process of meaning-making and a process of socio-spatial distinction through the symbolic and material construction of borders. We show that after decades of often descriptive research underpinned by state-centered understandings of how territorial borders have influenced tourism’s growth and development, recent developments in tourism geographies started linking up process-based understandings of borders with reflections on tourism’s place-making role. Our review highlights two important points. First, while massive strides have been made in recent years regarding the process-based understanding of tourism’s constitutive role in bordering processes (and vice versa), the cross-pollination between border studies and tourism geographies research on borders is still incomplete. Second, there is a need to move beyond insular tourism research to see how tourism’s place-making role related to borders and territory manifests in practice. We conclude that tourism is deeply embedded in bordering, ordering and othering society and space, both as an expression and as a driver of, or agent in, these processes, leading to tourism-specific impacts on the spatial environment and to broader socio-spatial (and inherently political) place-making outcomes.
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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.
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13. Tourism as an everyday geopolitical project
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