Tourism Geographies Podcast

AbstractLesbian, Gay, Bisexual (LGB) people can experience discrimination because of their minoritized status, which can be exacerbated when they come from a less privileged group or background compared to the rest of society. Travel can play a unique role in their lives by providing an opportunity to escape the constrictors of how one is defined and positioned in their home environment. The experiences enabled through travel can help build capacities that enhance well-being and the ability to cope with prejudice at home. This paper explores how LGB people with intersectional identities perceive the role of travel in contributing to their well-being and the activities they participate in while travelling. We frame intersectionality as one’s sexual orientation and the differences arising from one’s relative socioeconomic status. Through an online survey of 473 Australian LGB people, we identify five well-being segments, which differed on their socioeconomic status, travel activity choices, and sexual orientation. The results have implications for how travel is a well-being tool that supports different segments of LGB people through the provision of pleasure activities while also facilitating self-development, social contribution, and minimizing the impact of negative experiences on day-to-day life.

ABSTRACTThis article examines how digital nomads (generally defined here as those from the Global North working remotely without a permanent home) reacted to the COVID 19 pandemic. Using social media data and 37 indepth interviews with digital nomads from 16 countries, it argues that many in this group continued traveling to maintain their identity and avoid border closures and lockdowns. the article explores how they rationalized their mobility while navigating feelings of guilt, avoidance of shame, and deflecting accusations of geographical and epidemiological selfishness. New geopolitical conditions created both barriers and travel loopholes, with participants therefore attempting to maintain their group identity through movement while also limiting their social media participation to avoid moral sanction. Drawing on Mimi sheller’s work on mobility justice, the article closes by demonstrating how mobility guilt may be a phenomenon that outlasts the pandemic.

ABSTRACTThe Margaret River region (Western australia) is a popular international tourism destination. since its emergence in the late 19thcentury, tourism in the Margaret River region (MRR) has interacted with a number of regional industries including timber, dairy, and wine. these interactions have changed from ‘supportive’ to ‘competing’ reflecting various changes in the market and the availability of common local assets such as forest, land, and public funding. While timber and dairy had an important influence on the evolution of tourism in the region, it was the emergence of winethat shifted tourism the most.Using selected concepts of evolutionary economic geography (eeG), mainly path-dependence, path-reformation, interpath relations, and triggering events, this paper demonstrates how tourism has interacted with different other industries and how these interactions have shaped the MRR as a wine-tourist destination. the paper shows how two related triggering events contributed to the emergence of wine-tourism as a new path in the region – a pro-cess referred to as ‘path-blending’. in this respect, the paper provides empirical evidence that triggering events can result in multiple new paths and can also significantly shape the relations between new and existing regional paths. as such, the paper responds to the call for breaking away with the ‘single path view’ in research on industrial evolution, and for more attention to the various relations between tourism and other sectors within a tour-ist destination

AbstractLampedusa (Italy) and Lesvos (Greece) have become significant locations where the interaction between migration and tourism is expressed through the presence of volunteer tourism, which, along with supporting migrants, has spawned new practices, such as visiting emblematic sites of migrants’ passage, presence, and death. This study investigates the emergent practices of memorial tourism from the perspective of mobility justice. Specifically, considering this liminal practice, the study seeks an alternative route to the dead-end of political possibilities of volunteer tourism, by exploring, rather than denying, the paradoxes it produces. The study employs a comparative ethnographic approach using a multimethod process, including an online survey, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation. The author spent six months on Lampedusa and Lesvos as a volunteer. Via these tools, the research explores how volunteers’ actions reinforce and confirm mobility inequalities. Specifically, migration is ‘memorialized’ by volunteer tourists, while concurrently the individuals migrating, and in certain cases even those who return after completing their migratory path, have no access to the spaces of memory on Lampedusa and Lesvos. While volunteer tourists’ practices and relationships to these spaces can engender a growing awareness of the phenomenon of migration, an investigation of the emerging paradoxes argues that despite the risk of reproducing the forms of exclusion and injustice that volunteers seek to counter, some subjectivities gain new, significant positions that cause forms of resistance to the disciplinary power of the border regime.

AbstractUrban slums, especially in the Global South, have become popular attractions for tourists interested in sites off the beaten track and more authentic encounters with local culture. This practice has drawn attention from the media and extensive academic research, pointing out its controversial character due to the uneven power relations between hosts and guests and the commodification of poverty to turn it into a tourist attraction. Though acknowledging this pitfall, this work takes a different approach. We argue that tourism has agency in co-producing meanings and values in the process of making and consuming slums as tourist places. Within this process, the cultural capital of slums may find new avenues of legitimization. We critically analyze how discursive practices may valorize and legitimize slums as spaces for cultural production and consumption and the role of tourism in ordering, valuing, and visualizing vernacular cultural landscapes. The paper examines the case of favelas in Rio de Janeiro open to tourist visitation. Using as sources 79 articles from virtual media outlets (a mainstream, hegemonic newspaper, and a popular grassroots publication), official social media accounts, and tourism policies, we leverage Foucauldian discourse analysis and scrutinized the data, drawing insights on three categories of legitimization: authorization, rationalization, and moral evaluation. Our main findings show that tourism is often portrayed as a justification for securitization policies, as well as for fiscalization and formalization processes. Tourists were perceived to have authority in evaluating and valorizing slums’ cacophonic landscape beyond the evaluations of hegemonic social and political elites, which makes for a potential avenue of legitimization. However, in employing a more critical scope, two questions resonate: (1) who benefits from the valorization of slums’ cultural capital and, (2) who decides on the social validity of emergent cultural elements?

AbstractNature-based tourism in the desert can play an important role in reconnecting people with nature. Tourist experiences are influenced by imaginaries as well as the spiritual and aesthetic values of the landscape, promoting a new identity through a sense of transformation and belonging. These Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) shaped as well by geopolitical imaginaries have as yet remained unexplored. They are important, new contributions to the body of research. How do German-speaking group and cruise tourists imagine the desert and how do they experience the cultural values of the dry ecosystem ‘in situ’? Primarily, in-depth interviews and travel ethnography were applied along with photography and content analysis of marketing material. To support these methods, a survey was distributed to mega-cruise tourists visiting the desert. Results show that group tourists in particular romanticize an imaginary, quiet, empty place similar to a sacred space, promoting self-transformation, a deep connection with the space and sociality with nature and/or with others. Their experiences also enhance empathy for the natural environment through ‘self-immersion’, creating profound well-being. While in the desert, group tourists engage in a multi-sensuous immersion and spiritual transformation, while cruise tourists enjoy an adventure experience. 74% of the cruise tourists enjoyed being in a completely different environment. But, due to noise, overcrowding and built infrastructure, some CES such as silence, finding solitude and viewing of the sands are diminished. A proposed framework takes into account the influence of geopolitical imaginaries and the spiritual and aesthetic values of the desert leading to the core spiritual experience. Such a framework can justify the long-term protection of the desert, and its high cultural value, as well as an environmental ethic.

AbstractThis exploratory study presents Greenland as a case of a peripheral destination that complicates and contradicts global definitions of sustainable tourism. Using empirical data that consists of 39 semi-structured interviews, the author employs an inductive approach to discuss the conceptualisation of sustainable tourism according to local stakeholders in Greenland. The key points of conflict surrounding sustainable tourism in Greenland are identified and discussed, with a focus on how local stakeholders contradict each other, and on how the debates prevalent at the local scale can inform tourism development in other peripheral places. The paper contributes to academic literature by offering a deeper understanding of how core-periphery dynamics can influence perceptions of and priorities for sustainable tourism in peripheral places. It benefits the industry by exposing the main debates around the issue of sustainable tourism in Greenland, which can be used to inform the nation’s tourism development.

AbstractDiaspora tourism has become a significant form of transnational mobility that underlies many issues in the field of tourism and migration studies. Despite a considerable body of research that focuses on tourism motivations of home return and its social functions in collective identities and meaning-making, the political roles of diaspora tourism in shaping ethnic bonds and transnational networks need to be further acknowledged. Since 2014, a group of Muslims from Kazakhstan have travelled to China to celebrate their return after over 140 years of displacement from their homeland. Interviews with local officials and residents in Xi’an illustrate the political factors of host governments and local Muslim communities in organising the formal group tourism events. Unlike informal and personal travel, such officially organised diaspora tourism does not serve as a simple act of homecoming. The host governments have used it as a political tool to shape transnational networks and domestic ethnic governance under the discourse of ‘Belt and Road’ initiative. To fulfil this political agenda, the official narrative of diaspora tourism involves a process of remembering and forgetting, and the creation of itineraries that authenticates the imagined ancestral homeland while effacing the unsettled past. The itinerary of tourism events and related cultural practices focuses on a shared ethno-religious identity and common interests of cultural and business exchange between the selected diaspora representatives and host communities. However, due to its political nature, the sustainability of diaspora tourism does not only relate to funding and resource management. Such organised diaspora tourism is also closely associated with the shifting ethnic and migration policies of the host nation-state.

AbstractDespite existing in practice, as well as in other social science and policy literature, narcotourism has not appeared in tourism journals, and its full scope remains unarticulated. This paper aims to introduce narcotourism to a broad audience of tourism scholars, provide its conceptual foundations, and guide subsequent tourism scholarship on this topic. Looking beyond writings that have previously focused on the consumption of drugs during travel and tourism experiences, this paper presents a conceptual framework distinguishing six different tourism-related activities encompassed by the term narcotourism: consumption-oriented narcotourism, production-oriented narcotourism, acquisition-oriented narcotourism, dark heritage narcotourism, narcotrafficker tourism and emulatory narcotourism. This framework describes the hallmark characteristics of each form of narcotourism, identifies linkages between these forms of narcotourism and other areas of tourism scholarship, and concludes by suggesting a future research agenda for narcotourism. Given a long history of association between tourism activities and drug consumption, shifting legal dynamics regarding drug use, insights emerging from related disciplines, and narcotourism’s coexistence alongside myriad forms of tourism already explored by tourism scholars, this paper provides a timely foundation for future research on narcotourism within tourism studies.