Tourism Geographies Podcast

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.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2023.2291818AbstractThe 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.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2023.2280172AbstractDestinations with populations of African descent have continuously experienced negative stereotypes portrayed in traditional Western print media. These narratives have expanded to fake news circulating among individuals online, which calls for new techniques in combatting this issue. As there is limited evidence related to fake news in destinations, this research examines how fake news has emerged as a means of reinforcing negative stereotypes for destinations by examining three cases. It proposes a geographical perspective for understanding the production of fake news in tourism as simulated performances incorporating the setting of the frontstage, gazers and changing identities. These aspects drive the visibility, legitimacy and resistance to fake news, which can affect economic gains and conflicting discourses regarding these destinations. This research moves away from conceptualising fake news as solely narratives, as has been done previously. As a result, it draws attention to the spatiality of the phenomenon, which can provide practitioners with insights for developing and implementing destination image repair strategies. Practitioners should incorporate gazers into their strategies for combatting stereotypes. They also need to carry out continuous and real-time repair alongside bunking strategies prior to and during performances. Debunking strategies should provide contextual data in order to be effective. Alongside the empirical contributions, the research enhances the theoretical underpinning of fake news, social media and generally technologies in tourism through the application of concepts within media and black geographies research. These research areas remain understudied in tourism but can serve as pathways to guide further analyses on race in online contexts.

Doi: 10.1080/14616688.2023.2290002AbstractThis discussion provides a critical review of gender issues in tourism geographies. It maps historical and contemporary developments and provides a future research agenda that suggests moving beyond binary and Western gender discourses.