Tourism Geographies Podcast

https://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.

https://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.

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.