Tourism Geographies Podcast

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.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2366488AbstractThe boundaries between tourism and migration are blurry. This blurring has been beneficial for the governments of wealthy countries enabling them to import a large and flexible temporary workforce that can be directed toward regions and industries where there are labour shortages. Such is the case with the Australian Working Holiday Program (AWHP); a historically tourism-focused cultural exchange program that began in 1975. Since the 1990s, the Australian Government has leveraged the AWHP to support several of Australia’s critical industries. This has been achieved through the tweaking of mobility infrastructures that link Working Holiday Makers’ (WHMs) ability to stay in Australia to employment conditions. Such conditions increase precarity among WHMs, directing them towards remote regions and industries where there are evident labour shortages. While these mobility infrastructures significantly benefit Australia’s economy, they result in WHMs being highly vulnerable to exploitation. Such vulnerability is layered with WHMs from less wealthy, non-English-speaking countries facing the highest levels of vulnerability. This study investigates the way mobility infrastructures in the AWHP influence WHMs’ mobilities, as well as how such mobilities are experienced in uneven and unjust ways. There is urgency to interrogate the role that such programs play in contributing to unjust mobilities, and to query the attendant implications for sustainability.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2380321AbstractThis paper focuses on the settler colonial landscapes of tourism in the regional city of Dubbo, Australia. Dubbo is situated on Wiradyuri Country in the Orana region of New South Wales. Focusing specifically on the heritage-listed Old Dubbo Gaol and the Dundullimal Homestead, a former pastoral station, I explicate how these tourist sites offer experiences that normalise settler dwelling and occupation of First Nations Country. The Old Dubbo Gaol and Dundullimal occupy a broader settler colonial landscape where Dubbo is presented historically as ‘empty’ until settlers exploited the town’s ‘natural’ resources. By occluding the relationship between invasion, pastoralism, and Indigenous dispossession, the sites reproduce for visitors settler colonial metanarratives of dwelling. Using Tim Ingold’s notion of taskscape, I show how the tourist sites create taskscapes which invite visitors and consumers to engage in settler forms of dwelling that normalise a settler colonial landscape. Tourist taskscapes consist of the activities and interactions in a heritage site that encourage visitors to take an active role in experiencing place and history. By aligning these experiences and activities to settler narratives and histories, the sites interpellate visitors into the processes of autochthony that were/are used to negate First Nations sovereignties. While these taskscapes are leaky and contain the presence of First Nations in select parts of the heritage sites, the taskscapes dominate heritage tourism and normalise settler colonisation as a feature of place-making that does not require explicit explanation or education.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2304782AbstractThe fast-changing social media landscape have seen a paradigm shift in how we interact with and research space, place and environment in tourism. Social media presents both challenges and opportunities for tourism geographies due to the vast amount of and various data types. This research provides a concise state of the art and critical review of the history of social media research in tourism geographies by identifying the current status quo and research gaps. Accordingly, I highlight several directions for future tourism geographies research including cross-modalities of social media content, semantics and sense of place, technology and artificial intelligence in social media, social media communication, theoretical engagement, ethics and methodological considerations. This review calls for future research to develop innovative interdisciplinary, theoretical, and methodological approaches to advance theories and practices in social media and in relation to tourism geographies.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2342462AbstractAlongside the growth in the animal-based tourism industry, the volume and diversity of research on related issues has increased considerably over the last half century. The extant literature explores a very broad range of themes on animals in tourism. Several scholars before us have provided useful analyses and summaries of the existing knowledge: the dominant themes; the various research methods used by researchers; the geographic spread of research contexts; and stakeholder roles and perspectives, among other categories. This brief state-of-the-art review, which aims to build on the existing work, is not intended to be exhaustive. Instead of merely rehashing what is addressed in the literature, we identify a few central and emerging debates on animals in tourism in the post-2000 era, organised under three broad categories: (i) human-animal relations (animal ethics); (ii) sustainability in animal tourism; and (iii) the growing influence of social media and its hashtag movements. The conclusion draws attention to some notable gaps in the literature, on which we invite further exploration. These include the opportunities and risks presented by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other technologies; divergent cultural lenses in interpreting the role of animals in tourism; and animals in tourism education curricula. We hope that this review enlivens interest among tourism geographers around these critical areas.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2325932AbstractThe tourist area life cycle has been in existence for over four decades since its publication in The Canadian Geographer and was described as ‘one of the most cited and contentious areas of tourism knowledge….(and) has gone on to become one of the best known theories of destination growth and change within the field of tourism studies’ It was noted as one ‘Of the most influential conceptual models for explaining tourist, development’. The model was developed primarily from the Product Life Cycle model used in business and management studies and modified to explain the process of development and change that took place in tourist destinations throughout the world. The model has received considerable attention over its life span, but has often been cited from second hand sources or misquoted on many occasions. Its appearance in a non-tourist journal has resulted in it often not appearing in various early literature surveys based on tourism-focused sources and for its first decade access to the original article was limited and difficult, as demonstrated by many requests to the author for copies of the article. Electronic access to journals and libraries have resolved this problem, but its considerable visibility (in excess of 56,000 reads on Research Gate) and use (close to 5000 citations) means that it has possibly entered the realm of tourism myths and become part of accepted dogma in the field of tourism development. This could present problems to those challenging the original concept and introducing alternative or contradictory ideas and propositions, and it is perhaps, appropriate to briefly review the history of the concept.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14616688.2023.2299953AbstractThe evolution of tourism mobilities and their interactions with place have always comprised of ambiguous change dimensions relative to the social, spatial, and socio-spatial mobility of both guest and host communities alike. While different forms of tourism can offer opportunities for empowerment, they can also limit opportunities in ways that are unevenly distributed throughout the social spectrum. The aim of this opening to the special issue is to critically explore the different spheres in which social and spatial mobilities are enacted, reproduced, challenged, and negotiated in the context of the sub-discipline of tourism geographies. It considers multiple perspectives, while focusing on how ‘social mobility goes on holiday’ in three different spheres: (1) consumer societies, (2) regimented mobilities, and (3) empowerment through tourism, making specific reference to gender issues. Against this backdrop, emerging themes are discussed with reference to the entanglement of contemporary crises, and the societal and spatial im/mobilisations of subaltern communities, refugees, lifestyle migrants and local collectives. In this way, the frameworks proposed in this special issue help to analyse current societal and spatial challenges, and offer comprehensive answers through processes of theorisation and empirical interaction.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2311642AbstractThis article examines the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical integration of postcolonial cinema into critical tourism education. These works help viewers understand the influence of film as a primary source of postcolonial gaze, with the goal of decolonizing tourism studies. Postcolonial cinema reconnects geographic inquiry with the impacts of colonialism and postcolonialism on people and places in specific localities and across regions. Critical pragmatism is presented as synthesizing critical theory’s emphasis on listening, reflecting, and deliberating and traditional pragmatism’s emphasis on practice and place, as well as mixed research methods and multiple realities. Critical reflexivity is explored in critical tourism studies as relocated in pragmatist thought and a basis for abductive methodology and pedagogy. Abductive methodology is identified as a basis for addressing complex tourism issues and researcher positioning, while abductive pedagogy creates transformative learning environments where shared dialogue generates new knowledge. Critical pragmatism, enriched with gaze and reflexivity honed through postcolonial cinema, addresses perceived ontological and ‘realist’ deficiencies in critical tourism studies, while offering an alternative philosophical framework for informing and contrasting popular epistemologies and methodologies.