Tourism Geographies Podcast

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.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2019.1619823AbstractResearch has exposed how colonial power relations operate in and through various domains of tourism. As byproducts of Western academia, tourism research and education are significant sites where the structures, systems, and narratives of Settler colonialism can become further entrenched and legitimized. What research methodologies can challenge the colonial complexion of tourism research and enable tourism students and scholars to confront how their identities and responsibilities are tethered to (Settler) colonization? We argue that collective memory work (CMW), a participatory and participant-focused methodology, can contribute to these disruptive aims by examining individual experience as embedded and imbued with social meaning. Our ultimate objective is to situate, articulate, and reflect on the use of CMW as an unsettling methodology in tourism research and education contexts. Since 2016, we have used CMW to engage Settler Canadian graduate students in a process of critically analyzing individual memories and collective experiences of tourism and Indigenous–Settler relationships. After establishing theoretical and political contexts of Settler colonialism, we present an overview of CMW’s feminist and transformative underpinnings and explain how these are being adapted into the methods of our ongoing research with students. Preliminary insights from this research illuminate CMW as a consciousness-raising pedagogical methodology that, in focusing in on Settler memory narratives, helps make space for decolonization in tourism and tourism research.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2325941AbstractIn 2022, Thailand became the first country in Asia to decriminalize the possession of cannabis. Despite the government’s unwillingness to legalize recreational cannabis or promote cannabis tourism, a recreational cannabis industry fueled by tourism quickly emerged on a large scale in just a few months after decriminalization. Through the tourism worldmaking theory, the article seeks to show how cannabis tourism has taken shape in a semi-legal context following the decriminalization of cannabis in Thailand. Through a qualitative methodology combining document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and active participant observation, it is shown that following legislative changes, a recreational tourism industry has rapidly developed alongside the medical cannabis industry in which an array of cannabis products and services for tourists have emerged in the country’s major tourist destinations, transforming the tourism landscape of these places. Cannabis tourism has grown rapidly despite legal restrictions and government rhetoric aimed at preventing recreational cannabis tourism. The article aims to show that after opening Pandora’s box through the decriminalization of cannabis, cannabis tourism has developed on its own where many market-driven actors capitalized on this new economic opportunity following years of loss of income due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2023.2299832AbstractAlthough sustainable tourism research is a rich and diverse field, it still suffers from a few important shortcomings. Negligible attention has been given to various possible pathways to sustainable tourism (as opposed to sustainable tourism as a ‘goalpost’) and there is an insufficient understanding of how the interconnections and interdependencies within tourism as a complex system shape the pursuit of sustainability. What is therefore needed is a sharper focus on the actual processes that must unfold for a transition to sustainable tourism to take place, and a better conceptualisation of the tourism industry as a multi-actor and multi-dimensional socio-technical system. We argue here that the sustainability transitions agenda, which has developed over the last two decades at the interface of innovation studies, evolutionary economics, studies of technology and science, and various other fields, offers a promising way forward for the desired pathway towards sustainable tourism to be comprehensively understood and more effectively followed. In order to set the scene for the individual contributions to this collection, we elaborate on this argument by highlighting the key strengths of the sustainability transitions agenda and identifying their potential to help tourism scholars move the work on sustainable tourism in new, unprecedented, and imperative directions. Our overarching aim is to lay the foundations for bridging the gap between (sustainable) tourism research and the sustainability transitions literature to move this combined agenda forward.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2023.2286304AbstractBased on the case study of the ‘Arctic’ Village (Mohe, China), a popular tourist site renowned as China’s northernmost point and the best Chinese site to view the northern lights, this article investigates China’s ‘indigenising’ Arctic tourism that transcends conventional geographical boundaries of the Arctic Circle. It introduces ‘awkwardness’ as an empirical affect and an analytical concept to chart the way the village’s tourism practices and perceptions reinforce, challenge, and diverge from the state-centred account of China’s Arctic aspirations and re-territorialising efforts. Under the framework of an ‘awkward’ geopolitics of tourism, three interrelated types of awkwardness are analysed: embodied awkwardness, identity awkwardness, and demonstrative awkwardness. Each concerns a distinct geopolitical facet of village tourism at the spatialities of the body, village, and museum. The main argument is that affective experience not only mediates geopolitical power in tourism practices but also conceptually reconfigures the nexus between tourism and geopolitics across multiple scales. Incorporating awkwardness into tourism studies advances affective tourism and tourism geopolitics by offering an affective lens to reconceptualise contradictions, ruptures, and ambiguities inherent in associating geopolitics with mundane tourism practices and perceptions.

The Spanish Version starts at 35:47https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2021.1965202AbstractPotential to identify and cultivate forms of post-capitalism in tourism development has yet to be explored in depth in current research. Tourism is one of the world’s largest industries, and hence a powerful global political and socio-economic force. Yet numerous problems associated with conventional tourism development have been documented over the years, problems now greatly exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Calls for sustainable tourism development have long sought to address such issues and set the industry on a better course. Yet such calls tend to still promote continued growth as the basis of the tourism industry’s development, while mounting demands for “degrowth” suggest that growth is itself the fundamental problem that needs to be addressed in discussion of sustainability in tourism and elsewhere. This critique asserts that incessant growth is intrinsic to capitalist development, and hence to tourism’s role as one of the main forms of global capitalist expansion. Touristic degrowth would therefore necessitate postcapitalist practices aiming to socialise the tourism industry. While a substantial body of research has explored how tourism functions as an expression of a capitalist political economy, thus far no research has systematically explored what post-capitalist tourism might look like or how to achieve it. Applying Erik Olin Wright’s Citation2019 innovative typology for conceptualizing different forms of post-capitalism as components of an overarching strategy for “eroding capitalism” to a series of illustrative allows for exploration of their potential to contribute to an analogous strategy to similarly “erode tourism” as a quintessential capitalist industry.