Episodes

  • https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2366488


    Abstract

    The 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.


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  • https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2380321

    Abstract

    This 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.


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  • https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2304782

    Abstract

    The 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.


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  • https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2386269

    Abstract

    Regenerative tourism argues that addressing the current ecological crisis requires inner transformation, referring to changes in people’s mindsets, values, beliefs, and worldviews. Combined, they influence the systems we create and, as such, represent deep levers for systems change. Yet, an in-depth analysis of the inner dimension in the context of regeneration is missing. It is unclear which qualities foster inner development towards regenerative change. Using the concept of leverage points and through a scoping review and thematic analysis of 309 articles on regenerative approaches, regenerative tourism, and the inner dimension of sustainability, this study proposes the Inner Regenerative Development Framework, a whole-person approach constituting aspects of our inner world that enhance our ability to work regeneratively; conceptualised here as Inner Regenerative Development. The framework brings together cognitive, affective, grounded, and holistic aspects of ourselves, encompassing 12 inner leverage points and 85 inner qualities serving as the basis for interventions, a few of which are proposed as starting points for inner-outer transformation. Collectively, these elements highlight the inner domains, capacities, and practices that can be cultivated to support regenerative tourism from the inside out.


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  • https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2342462

    Abstract

    Alongside 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.


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  • https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2325932

    Abstract

    The 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.


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  • https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14616688.2023.2299953

    Abstract

    The 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.


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  • https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2311642

    Abstract

    This 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.


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  • https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2019.1619823

    Abstract

    Research 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.


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  • https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2325941Abstract

    In 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.

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  • https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2023.2299832Abstract

    Although 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.

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  • https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2023.2286304

    Abstract

    Based 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.


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  • The Spanish Version starts at 35:47https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2021.1965202Abstract

    Potential 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 Citation

    2019 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.


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

    Abstract

    The 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.


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  • https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2023.2280172

    Abstract

    Destinations 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.


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  • Doi: 10.1080/14616688.2023.2290002Abstract

    This 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.

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  • https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2023.2299845

    Abstract

    Digital nomadism has become a rapidly growing subject of interest both in the public and scientific domain especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. Conceptual and empirical developments in research on digital nomads show that the geographic perspective on digital nomadism has been very limited. The geographical framing of digital nomadism and publications in the geographical fora are still scarce. Despite the accelerating trend and potential transformative effect on places, the perspective of place (or speaking in tourism terms—destination perspective) on digital nomadism has been very limited, with the major focus being on the travellers and their experiences. In this article, I will discuss the existing knowledge on digital nomadism through a central geographical concept of place. Among other topics, I will show the way place is involved in the production of digital nomadic mobilities, especially in relation to the issue of geoarbitrage and local impact; specifically, the way place is connected to coworkcation and visa policies. I focus on the main research themes in digital nomadism and show the way they inform geography and tourism geographies.


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  • https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2023.2275731

    Abstract

    In marking 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived to Jamestown, United States in 1619, the Ghana government through the Ghana Tourism Authority initiated the Year of Return 2019 (#YOR2019). The goal was to unite Africans in the diaspora with those on the continent, especially in Ghana, through a year-long calendar of commercial and commemorative slavery heritage tourism activities ranging from visits to slavery sites, healing ceremonies, theatre and musical performances, festivals, investment forums and relocation conferences. When a destination tourism product is rooted in a less-than-desirable past, how is ‘balance’ achieved between commercialization and commemoration? In exploring this conceptual question, we developed a methodological innovation utilizing the social media platform Twitter for data collection. Using a social media crawler coded in Python programming language, we scrapped tweets from the accounts of the Ghana Tourism Authority prior, during, and after the YOR2019 based on hashtag searches. After data cleaning, 1010 tweets were inductively analysed using NVIVO qualitative data analysis software. The findings revealed three emergent themes along a commodification-commemoration continuum: (1) the eventification and festivalisation of slavery heritage tourism, (2) celebrity co-production of YOR2019 experiences through social media and (3) pivoting from a predominantly slavery heritage destination to a destination that focuses on other touristic and business travel. Ultimately, YOR2019 marked a significant push by Ghana to move into a ‘Beyond the Return’ phase that pivots away from slavery heritage towards a more well-rounded tourism product for roots, leisure, and business travellers. The research established that commodification in slavery heritage tourism does not inherently destroy cultural meanings but provide new commemorative meanings for a new generation of Black travellers searching for more than just their roots.


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  • https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2023.2280690

    Abstract

    This study was prompted by a lack of empirical research addressing the overlap between sense of community and eudemonic well-being components, the limited attention paid to immigrant perspectives in well-being studies, and the presence of under-researched type of festival and population. To address these gaps, this study aimed to identify the dimensions of sense of community and the well-being outcomes of diaspora festivals. The study targeted an understudied group and its festivals: those of the Ethiopian diaspora community in the United States. Guided by the constructivist grounded theory method, the study obtained data through guided interviews, and simultaneously analyzed them to construct six domains of a sense of community applicable to diaspora festivals. The six elements of a sense of community were a sense of belonging, a sense of togetherness, serving the com­munity, recognition, social support, and connection with diaspora, and comprised at least one eudemonic well-being component. Engagement, positive relationships, finding meaning in life, and a sense of achievement, were inherent in more than three of the six domains of a sense of community. Other well-being elements such as physical health and spirituality were evident in one domain. In conclusion, this study offers theoretical contributions to festival tourism, community psychology, human/tourism geography, and positive psychology research in multiple ways.


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  • https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2023.2290662

    Abstract

    This research brings an original anthropological approach to the understanding of how the tourism industry negotiates the construction of elusive, magical geographies. Fairy tourism or ‘fairy hunting’ has been acknowledged since the nineteenth century, but is largely overlooked in tourism literature, despite increasing exposure to fairy motifs through multi-media platforms, including films, gaming, and literature. This study examines fairy festivals using a theoretical framework based on the novel concept of ‘liminal affective technologies,’ (LATS), that are designed to enhance transformative potentiality. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis method is used to analyse how fairy festival producers generate approximations of Fairyland. To create fairyscapes, their organisers devise LATs, such as situating the events in places that are bucolic, mystical and connected to local folklore, and staging workshops, music, and activities, such as wish-making, using fairy-themed motifs, to reinforce the magical narrative. Yet several festival producers ‘toned down’ the troublesome or Pagan elements of the fairyscape, explaining the surreality of their events to visitors as dreamscapes.


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