Pop Culture Tourism and Fan Pilgrimage

This month we published Touristic World-Making and Fan Pilgrimage in Popular Culture Destinations edited by Vassilios Ziakas, Christine Lundberg and Maria Lexhagen. In this post we find out more about the editors’ research and their own fan pilgrimages.

How did you come to be interested in the field of popular culture tourism?

Our interest in popular culture tourism began in 2008 when the first movie based on the Twilight Saga book series was released, and we came across travel accounts from tourists travelling to the “homes” of the vampires and werewolves featured in the series. It made us start thinking about our own earlier excursions to, for example, Scotland with the purpose to visit locations featured in the 1986 movie Highlander and to France to places associated with the Irish alternative rock band U2 (more on that below). We instinctively understood that there were some interesting common grounds that linked different types of popular culture expressions (e.g. film, TV shows, music, literature) and their audiences longing to experience the physical (and digital) spaces and places associated with their interest, that were also exciting to explore in academic literature and empirical work.

Why did you feel this was an important book to write?

This book challenges the dominion of reductionist, insulated and fragmentalist perspectives that prompt the continuous compartmentalisation of popular culture and tourism. This has resulted in overspecialised niche forms of cultural-related travel products that are disjointed, cause further divisions and are used ad hoc by destinations. Different understandings, values and expectations underpin their narrow concentration and interests, which hamper broader synergies and collaboration. We challenge these shortcomings by employing an interdisciplinary holistic approach. We suggest that popular culture tourism is a comprehensive phenomenon comprising different forms of leisure and expressive culture as they intersect with tourism. On this basis, we merge patterns of fan pilgrimage and placemaking to shed light on the making of popular culture destinations. This holistic approach enables to better understand how ‘touristic worlds’ are co-constructed by the interaction of various stakeholders, especially fan travel behaviour and the responses of destinations. Also, a holistic approach led us to encompass different ontological and epistemological paradigms as signified by the thematic, disciplinary and methodological diversity of the chapter contributions. This variety does not invoke diversity for its own sake. Instead, it allows for exploring how popular culture destinations create symbolic schemes of the world, patterned with visions, images and stories of each fandom that represent particular worldviews and lifestyles. Consequently, this volume pushes to refocus our outlook and ontological-epistemological angles in the tourism field towards building more holistic frameworks and models, thereby redirecting attention on compound processes and composite practices of synthesis. We make a strong case for making this turn. With this book, we encourage scholars to overcome insulated logics and explore avenues for enabling truly interdisciplinary integration and synthesis in tourism and beyond.

What are the key takeaways you hope readers will come away with?

The notion of world-making is at the core of the book exploring the ways that popular culture destinations are made. It is shown how world-making emanates from the interaction of fan communities that envisage singular or multiple realities, conventional or alternative orders, conservative or radical possibilities, and their interpretations by destination stakeholders that shape realist responses and policies for popular culture tourism development. It is thus demonstrated that destination responses are characterised by the complex and creative appropriation of fandoms, heritage, digital media, spatial topographies and physiognomies, as well as world imaginaries for the purpose of placemaking. This builds up a universe of animated signs and meanings, a highly heterogeneous cosmos that combines, though disorderly and at times randomly, fantasy and reality. The employment of world-making as an analytical framework enables a holistic take on fandoms, their pilgrimage journeys and the touristification of places. In this context, interrelationships and interaction effects can be thoroughly examined by addressing the dialectical interface of the following binary parameters in the making of popular culture destinations:

• Imagination and Reality
• Tourism as Special Time and the Everyday
• Fan and Place Identities
• Living Heritage of Fandoms and Destinations
• Fan Pilgrimage Experience and Resident Quality of Life
• Commodification and Authenticity
• Individual Fandom Expressions and Hybridisation
• Culture and Digitalisation
• Strategy and Placemaking

As you compiled your book, did anything in the research particularly surprise or intrigue you?

It certainly is striking how powerful fan practices are in shaping intended and unintended popular culture destinations and attractions, sometimes matching the ideas of local and tourism stakeholders. How plural views of world-making are so important for the successful making of place and cultural change as well as having the capacity of holding conflicting meanings. Fan pilgrimage and popular culture tourism really are influential in visioning the futures of the world through bridging the local with the global.

Also, how rewarding it was to see how the contributions of this book came together and connect until now mostly unconnected perspectives. We are very happy to share through this book, our effort in building an interdisciplinary analysis and shedding light on places, fans, pasts, present and future ways of life and how they combine in creating and recreating popular culture capital and the socioeconomic, political and environmental consequences that emerge from it.

What are you fans of? What are some pilgrimages you’ve personally done?

One of us has been a dedicated fan of U2 (the Irish rock band) and their music for many decades. Many trips in the footsteps of the band have been done over the years such as to France, Ireland, Sweden and Portugal, while also engaging in online communities with other fans as well as a longstanding membership of their official fan club. Often, these travel experiences create a strong emotional connection to places visited or of being part of a crowd before, in and after a concert. Family and friends have also tagged along in sometimes surprising explorations of places associated with the band, or band members, in for them unexpected places. Some tangible pieces of these intangible and multisensory experiences are now on display as memorabilia filling up an entire purpose-bought cabinet at home.

From the empirical work on popular culture tourism we have done, we know that generational travelling is sometimes important as a motivating factor. Another personal example of being a fan is that one of the editors has a strong connection through the interest of children in the family, to ice hockey. This has led to several pilgrimage trips to the ice hockey mecca of New York city visiting games, taking guided tours for fans, and encounters with hockey team celebrities. These ‘sacred’ experiences not only build an even stronger commitment to the sport, but also link the everyday family practice of sports with fan travelling.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Contents Tourism and Pop Culture Fandom edited by Takayoshi Yamamura and Philip Seaton.

Channel View Publications / Multilingual Matters’ 2023 Roundup

As 2023 draws to a close, we look back at all the big moments for the CVP/MM team over the past year. 

As ever, we had a busy year for new books with plenty of exciting titles to keep you reading right through 2024! To name just a few, on the Multilingual Matters side we had Quality and Equity in Education edited by Michael Byram, Mike Fleming and Joseph Sheils, Making Connections by John Corbett, Hugo Dart and Bruno Ferreira de Lima, A Panorama of Linguistic Landscape Studies by Durk Gorter and Jasone Cenoz (which is available open access), the second edition of Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning Differences by Judit Kormos and Anne Margaret Smith, Spanish So White by Adam Schwartz (including our first ever foray into audiobooks!) and Political Activism in the Linguistic Landscape by Philip Seargeant with Korina Giaxoglou and Frank Monaghan.

Meanwhile, a couple of the key titles this year under the Channel View Publications imprint were Changing Practices of Tourism Stakeholders in Covid-19 Affected Destinations edited by Erdinç Çakmak, Rami K. Isaac and Richard Butler and Control, Abuse, Bullying and Family Violence in Tourism Industries by Elisa Zentveld.

We also continued with our online events, originally established in 2020 during the pandemic, when we weren’t able to attend conferences and wanted another way to promote our books. It’s been great to be able to include Q&As at the end of our events so that anyone watching can have the opportunity to ask an expert in their field a question.

This year we’ve had events with authors Gary Barkhuizen and Chika Takahashi about their books in our Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching series, JPB Gerald speaking about his book Antisocial Language Teaching and Adam Schwartz with his book Spanish So White. These events have been a valuable addition to our calendar and we appreciate everyone who has joined us and asked thoughtful questions of our speakers. We’ll be bringing you some more events with our authors in 2024, so watch this space…

2023 has felt like the first year where we’ve got back to a full conference schedule after tentatively dipping our toe back in the water last year. On the Channel View Publications side we’ve attended CAUTHE, ATLAS and the Surrey conference, while on the Multilingual Matters side we’ve been to AAAL, The Forum on Education Abroad, IATEFL, the Postgraduate Researcher Conference, Language Policy Forum, AILA, BAAL, InDialog, ALAPP, EuroSLA, Better Bilingual EAL Celebration Event and NALDIC. It’s been lovely to reconnect with our authors, friends and fellow publishers and we’re looking forward to another jampacked year in 2024!

Now that most of our staff don’t live in Bristol (we’re spread out from Dunblane in Scotland to Dawlish in Devon), we don’t get to see each other as much as we’d like. To go some way towards remedying this, we’ve established in-person meetings held every couple of months that we all attend in Bristol, with an obligatory lunch together, of course.

In October we announced the creation of the Channel View Publications / Multilingual Matters Open Access Fund. Each year we will fully fund at least one open access publication to support authors who wouldn’t otherwise be able to fund open access publication for their work. We’re really proud of this initiative and hope it will increase visibility, dissemination, use and impact of top-quality academic research, particularly for research originating in Low to Middle Income Countries and scholars working outside of traditional academic institutions.

Also in October, we had some very exciting news – Laura had a baby! Luckily we didn’t have to wait too long to meet Nicholas, as she brought him into the office to visit us when he was just a couple of weeks old!

 

 

It’s been a good year for Channel View Publications / Multilingual Matters and we’d like to thank you all for your support and wish you a very merry Christmas and happy new year!

How Can Intangible Cultural Heritage Tourism be Sustainable?

We recently published Intangible Cultural Heritage and Tourism in China by Junjie Su. In this post the author explains what inspired him to write the book.

This book is a reflection of my thinking and travelling on an interesting journey of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) in tourist attractions in China. As ICH became a hot topic in China and the world over the past 20 years, ICH tourism has developed in many parts of the world. Nevertheless it is important to note that many theoretical and practical issues have emerged alongside the development of ICH tourism, such as the dilemma of authenticity and commodification, as well as the empowerment and marginalisation of ICH practitioners etc. The more I am involved in the discussion of these complicated issues, the clearer it becomes that these issues cannot be addressed before I understand what ICH means to different people.

Thus, a critical approach is needed to understand what ICH means. As I studied in China and Australia, cross-cultural education enables me to look at ICH tourism through the lens of critical heritage studies and critical tourism studies, which breaks through traditional understanding that ICH tourism is just a niche market of tourism where ICH is commodified for tourists. With the “ICH practitioner-based approach”, I argue in my book that ICH tourism is more than that, as it is a way of making ICH through commodification in tourism so that it can be sustained and/or re-created in tourism. Rather than a traditional tourism study, this book examined the understandings of ICH tourism from the perspective of ICH practitioners, government officials and experts, rather than tourists. I believe ICH practitioners should be privileged and empowered for their role in tourism development; therefore, I proposed the concepts of “subjective authenticity” and “subjective integrity” to describe their abilities and agencies.

As China has been active in the protection and use of ICH since its ratification of UNESCO’s ICH Convention in 2004, a study of ICH tourism in China is needed in the fields of heritage studies, tourism studies and Chinese studies. Among many ICH tourist attractions in China, Lijiang, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is a typical case. Although there have been rich studies on ethnic/cultural tourism in China, this book takes ICH tourism as a new perspective to look at the relationship between the making of ICH and the development of ICH, revealing the dynamics of the power relations from national to local official levels.

This book is largely based on my PhD research on ICH and heritage tourism in Yunnan Province, China from 2012 to 2017, fieldwork that I was carrying out until recently, extending the discussion beyond China. After experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic, we care more about the sustainability of heritage and tourism in a changing world. I hope this book will provide some useful thoughts on the understanding of sustainable ICH tourism.

Junjie Su

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Cultural Heritage and Tourism by Dallen J. Timothy.

Mediating the Transition of China through Tourism

This month we are publishing The Rise of Tourism in China by Yiping Li. In this post the author explains the background to the book.

This book is about the role of tourism in China’s social and cultural change over the past thirty years (1992-2022). From a humanistic perspective and relying largely on the notion of place as centre of meaning, it portrays how contemporary discourses fuse with individual histories to formulate the ways in which tourists understand China. When I decided to write this book, the first thing that came to mind is history. To me, history not only informs us about where we came from and are now, it also helps us to set a vision of where we are moving forward.

Half a century ago, China was poor, reclusive and isolated. Supplies of basic commodities were so tight that consumption of tourism and leisure services were out of the question. However, this has all changed since the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping initiated the economic reform and opening up of the country in 1978. Thereafter tourism was considered as both a gesture of embracing the world and one of the driving forces for the economic reform. In 1992, China held the first ever themed tourism promotion year – Visit China ’92. I was lucky to be one of the participants in that epoch-making event, being a young translator in the Organizing Committee of China Travel Fair ’92, thus witnessing the role of tourism in China’s social and cultural change over the past three decades.

The author on a field research trip in the 1990s

China’s decades-long isolation created sociocultural and economic distances from the outside world. The distances, however, turned out to be some ‘charming mysteries’ that enticed international visitors, boosting the international inbound tourism in the last decades of the twentieth century. The photo on the left was taken during a field research trip of mine in the 1990s. The local woman in the foreground was begging from us while I was distributing informed consent forms to my interviewees – Western tourists. She said she would be in the photo if she were paid. In those days, these kinds of poor beggars were not uncommon in China. During the interview, the tourists informed me that they came to China to seek a traditional and ‘authentic’ society which was hard to find in their own countries. They even anticipated that Western tourists would lose interest in China if the country ever became too developed.

I was surprised, if not shocked, at those Western tourists’ understanding of China as a traditional and ‘authentic’ society, because building a developed and modernized China had been our national dream generation after generation. Will a rapidly changing China ever turn itself into an unattractive tourist destination? With this question in mind, I moved on with my research and teaching in tourism studies from Canada to Hong Kong. Time flies, and so came the year of 2008 when Beijing hosted the Summer Olympic Games. Focusing on the Games, my research team studied the impacts on Beijing as a tourist destination. We attempted to evaluate the impacts in terms of location, locale and sense of place. Our research findings indicated that the Games were truly momentous for the rise of China and especially the tourism industry.

A neighbourhood being demolished in the heart of Beijing for new development project

Beijing’s traditional courtyard home is disappearing

Starbucks has replaced traditional catering business in Beijing’s most popular commercial area Qianmen Boulevard

The traditional “big bottle” plain flavour yogurt of old Beijing

After the Beijing Summer Games, China started to change at an unprecedented speed in economic terms. The places and people were shaped and reshaped tremendously in the wave of the nation’s modernisation campaign, as shown in the photos above (click on them for captions). Consequently, a series of social, cultural and economic issues emerged that formulated new questions for my academic enquiries of tourism in China: What would people feel when the places they used to call home have changed and disappeared? What would be their attitudes and reactions towards the changes? With those questions, I moved on with my research and teaching from Hong Kong to China. Time moved on very fast as usual, and then came the year of 2019. Following that, the COVID pandemic put world leisure travel on hold for more than two years.

An empty beach, taken in October 2022

Tourism in China suffered most from COVID among world nations, as the Chinese government held on to its so-called Zero-COVID policy until the very end of 2022. During the peak holiday season – the October Golden Week Holiday of 2022, China’s tourist spots reported nearly zero tourists. When I looked at the empty beach in a popular tourist city, as shown in the photo on the right, I also saw an urgent need that scholars study tourism in China as not only a social and economic phenomenon, but also relating to history and experience of individuals. This book, therefore, aims to help readers realise that analyses of tourism in China should look beyond both the environmental perception studies that focus on individuals and realism’s geometry, towards the regularities of intersubjective images of place that are imbued with emotional content and historical significance. In this vein, it reaffirms that understanding human nature is essential and, to achieve this, ethnography is an effective approach.

Li Yiping (PhD), Professor, College of Management, Guangzhou University

liyiping225588@gmail.com

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Intangible Cultural Heritage and Tourism in China by Junjie Su.

The Dark Side of Family Tourism

This month we published Control, Abuse, Bullying and Family Violence in Tourism Industries by Elisa Zentveld. In this post the author explains what motivated her to write the book.

I decided to write this book after journeying through three different court matters related to untangling myself and my four children from family violence. I had been a tourism academic for about the same amount of time I was married to an abusive and controlling man. I never really thought about my experiences of tourism until after I separated from living with family violence.

Why was it that I did not like to travel places? Why was it I could not remember much about the trips? Why was it that I would look at the view but not see it? It is only with the clarity of thinking after separation that the pieces of the puzzle start to connect.

As the title suggests, this book is about control, abuse, bullying and family violence. These are matters that might impact any person and take place in any industry, although in some cases these may be especially heightened in times of celebration and events. Many businesses that serve tourists rely heavily on young casually employed workers, which can present as a more vulnerable group and as such sometimes more problems can arise in those workplaces. This book outlines how these problematic components impact the tourism system. Whilst tourism is viewed as a time for “happy holidays”, family violence happens behind lots of different closed doors – not just the ones at home.

I spent more years living with family violence than I wanted to, as I stayed until the youngest two (twins) of my four children were almost 12 years of age. As much as I was longing for freedom, I had researched enough to know that the children may very well be worse off if I separated too early. That may make no sense to many people, but as my book explains, many people are left with harmful court orders forcing children to have significant contact with a perpetrator of family violence. Such orders can result in some victims regretting separating and feeling things are worse.

I did a lot of planning and strategising for my three separate court outcomes. I spent every night for so very many months reading the Family Law Act and case law. For my third court journey, I took 6 weeks off work to plan how to change the children’s names through court. The outcomes from the three court journeys resulted in me being awarded sole parental responsibilities, a five-year intervention order, and the children’s names changed. These outcomes were better than what so many other victims are handed down, although were far from a smooth passage as is explained in my book. And so, I thought – all that learning had to be for a bigger reason than just me and my children.

That was the seed for this book. To grow the seed, more thinking was done, and I started thinking more about tourism experiences for people who live with family violence, or with harmful court orders. Tourism is supposed to be for rest, relaxation, and escape; but family violence does not go on a holiday. There is no break from it. In fact, it often gets worse. The more I wondered and talked to people the more I realised that the tourism models were flawed and were an illusion that did not include a major segment of society – those living with family violence. I realised that some children cannot even see maternal families who reside overseas because the perpetrator doesn’t allow it, and in some cases, the family court doesn’t either (to “be fair” to both sides). The data for family violence incidents at times such as Christmas and sporting events are nothing short of alarming.

And so, the seed of an idea for this book grew to maturity. I hope this book provides useful information to further our understanding of control, abuse, bullying and family violence around the globe. We also need to be mindful of the duality of abuse whereby some people endure abuse at work and then go home to endure it at home. There is no time to feel safe. We need better systems at work and in the court. Can a person who is abusive to their partner be a good parent? That should be at the front of the minds of anyone making decisions in the child’s best interests.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Femininities in the Field edited by Brooke A. Porter and Heike A. Schänzel.

How has Covid-19 Affected Tourism Stakeholders?

This month we published Changing Practices of Tourism Stakeholders in Covid-19 Affected Destinations edited by Erdinç Çakmak, Rami K. Isaac and Richard Butler. In this post the editors explain the importance of focusing on stakeholders in this context.

The Covid-19 pandemic caused unprecedented impacts on tourism at all scales, from local to international, and its effects are likely to be felt for some years to come, even when tourism numbers recover to pre-Covid levels. One of the major impacts has been the way in which the many and varied stakeholders in tourism have reacted to the travails of the pandemic and the restrictions imposed by most governments. Our new book includes a range of adjustments and changes established by greatly varying stakeholders in different countries and settings during the course of the pandemic.

One of the common factors emerging from the chapters is that many of the individual stakeholders discussed in the volume were forced to make their own adjustments to survive the pandemic, both economically and literally. Such a situation came about because, for many small stakeholders, their concerns were not noted or were ignored by government agencies responsible for handling the responses to the pandemic. In some cases, even with their own tourism industry segment, many enterprises were too small to be given attention, and ‘fell through the cracks”. Thus, many had to improvise and change their approach to visitors in order to stay in business, and while some of the responses were individually unique, e.g. in the case of small operators in Iran, in other cases, where the scale was very different, e.g. in the airline industry, some ‘solutions’ were shared and applied in similar ways in very different circumstances.

One of the interesting features of the book is the variation in responses in different cultural and religious situations, with some stakeholders changing operations, and others placing trust in their faith and continuing to operate with little change in behaviour. When looking to the future, some commentators are pessimistic in terms of continued fear of infections and negative attitudes towards foreign visitors by residents of destinations areas, and there is a general lack of confidence that governments will be prepared or effective in the case of future pandemics, based on experiences from Covid-19. While many sectors and academics forecasted the epidemic as a potential for transformation, it remains philosophical and theoretical, with no proof that travellers or the travel industry are truly embracing proximity tourism, staycation, and ‘new urban tourism’.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Tourism and Resilience by C. Michael Hall, Girish Prayag and Alberto Amore.

If Looking for Quality Tourists, Destinations Should Consider Backpackers

This month we published Backpacking Culture and Mobilities edited by Michael O’Regan. In this post the editor addresses the idea of  ‘quality tourists’, which often excludes backpackers.

Interest in backpacking or budget independent travel as an ‘alternative’ form/type of tourism has ebbed and flowed ever since the word and label ‘backpacker’ emerged in the 1980s.  While representations of backpackers have never been wholly positive in the media, which has long impacted attitudes of parents and destination authorities, today there are accusations that backpackers contribute to overtourism, covid outbreaks and irresponsible behaviour such as abandoned vehicles, wild camping and even the drug trade.

Rodrigo Duterte, former President of the Philippines, noted in 2022 that backpackers ‘who don’t really have money and carry only a bag with them…immediately look for a nice spot and do drugs there’. Viktor Laiskodat, Governor of East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, noted there ‘are many poor ones in NTT, we are tired of seeing these peasants’. New Zealand tourism minister, Stuart Nash said he would replace vans of backpackers in self-contained vehicles who ‘pull over to the side of the road and … shit in our waterways’ and ‘travel around our country on $10 a day eating dried noodles.’  Luhut Pandjaitan, coordinating minister for maritime affairs and investment in Indonesia, said that post-pandemic ‘We will filter tourists,’ as ‘We don’t want backpackers to come so that Bali remains clean, where the people who come are of quality.’

As destinations authorities seek to increase ‘quality tourists’ after the pandemic, they increasingly believe quality tourists with high spend should replace ‘low’ quality backpackers. However, my new edited book from Channel View Publications, Backpacking Culture and Mobilities: Independent and Nomadic Travel, takes a fresh, critical and reflexive look at over 40 years of backpacking research and introduces new and unexplored perspectives on backpacking and the nature of ‘quality’. The twelve chapters show the value and worth of backpacking for individuals, destinations and local businesses. The central narrative that emerges indicates the worth of backpackers should not be subject to just a cost-benefit calculation. As well as their contribution to specific individuals and populations, such as Iranian females, Chinese youth and Israeli families, the chapters show how local communities, small-to-medium sized enterprises and entrepreneurs benefit from backpackers. The chapters show how backpackers are both rare and essential to destination development and resilience. Destinations require a diversity of tourists and businesses, with quality over quantity not applicable, until we understand quality more holistically to include social, economic, cultural and economic benefits.

For more information about this book please see our website.

Locals’ Love of Place as a Pathway to Sustainability

This month we published The Local Turn in Tourism edited by Freya Higgins-Desbiolles and Bobbie Chew Bigby. In this post the editors write about the inspiration behind the book.

Pre-pandemic, tourism was suffering from an image problem as the impacts of ‘overtourism’ became an issue around the globe. Then the pandemic struck, effectively shutting down international tourism for several months. As we emerge from these times, a question on everybody’s minds, from the World Tourism Organization to the smallest of tourism enterprises, is what comes next?

Can we rethink tourism in such a way that economic, social and ecological sustainability fully underpins the phenomenon?

We have been doing some of this rethinking together and collaboratively with others. We favour defining tourism by the local community rather than by the tourism industry and the tourists. This approach would reorient tourism to ensure local well-being and thriving. But when we use the term local community, we are broadly inclusive – of the many types of people living in a place, connected and obligated to past and future generations and of the whole ecology of that place.

We are not inventing something new with these ideas, but we are channelling swirling currents into a new and focused direction. We suggest moving beyond community participation models and community-based tourism, to a transformation in the total phenomenon of tourism. This grounds tourism in the strength of locals’ love of place and shapes it to the wisdom of place-based governance.

For co-editor Bobbie, these questions of re-thinking tourism in line with the priorities of local communities and goals of sustainability began from experiences as a traveller and a student of different cultures:

“One of my earliest memories of seeing the ways that tourism could literally and profoundly disrupt communities was over 20 years ago when I had the opportunity to accompany my mother, a language teacher, on an educational trip to Venice. Walking the canals with her felt like a test in navigating the crowds and avoiding being crushed. Looking up towards the sky, a cruise ship that had pulled into the lagoon towered over the old buildings, leaving them dwarfed in its gigantic shadow. It should be remembered that this was long before the term overtourism was coined. Yet based on this early memory of being a witness to tourism so deeply out of sync with sustainability and local communities, this experience ingrained in me just how powerful tourism can be in relation to the objectives upon which it is designed. Fortunately, both at home and in other places of learning where I have spent time across the globe, there have been some incredible examples of community-driven tourism, ranging from my own Cherokee Tribal Nation’s tourism programs that aim to tell our story as Cherokee people, to the arts-based tourism experiences offered by youth cultural ambassadors at Cambodian Living Arts in Cambodia. In these experiences of tourism that are grounded in and led by community priorities, sustainability in economic, social and ecological realms is not only made possible, but can also potentially be sustained over longer periods of time.”

Yitpi Yartapuultiku – The ‘Soul of Port Adelaide’ – new Aboriginal Cultural Centre community consultation 17 November 2022, Port Adelaide, South Australia”

For Freya, learning from communities never ceases:

“Last night, I attended an event presenting progress on an urban Aboriginal cultural centre for the Kaurna people of Adelaide to be sited on the Port River. We’ve waited for decades for such a centre, with the original vision focused on reconciliation between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal people in this western precinct of the city. But a new vision has emerged as the centre is dreamed into existence. It will be shaped by the ecology of this coastal, wetland and river environment and informed by Kaurna cultural knowledge and wisdom. In addition to serving as a site for cultural education and connection, it will be used to prepare this vulnerable environment for the rising waters resulting from climate change. This includes acting as a model site for managing the ecology using a ‘living shorelines’ approach to engage nature’s wisdom for restoration and adaptation. Many wisdoms come together in the vision for this project; I think it perfectly embodies what we mean by locals’ love of place acting as a pathway to sustainability.”

The book The Local Turn in Tourism: Empowering Communities represents a community of practice underway to start to flesh out the possibilities for this work. It is only the beginning though and there is much more work to be done. We invite you to join us in these efforts. It offers a hopeful approach, shaping tourism to honour and bring out the best in people and places.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Inclusive Tourism Futures edited by Anu Harju-Myllyaho and Salla Jutila.

The Passenger Experience of Air Travel

This month we published The Passenger Experience of Air Travel edited by Jennie Small. In this post the editor writes about the inspiration behind the book.

As I am writing, from a suburb in Sydney, I hear a plane overhead, and then another and another. Arriving or departing? I can’t tell, but a familiar background, a reminder of the world where air travel has become such a regular means of transport for many and, for some, an ‘everyday’ experience. Living in an island nation, all my international travel is by air, as is much of my interstate travel, due to the large distances. While I have the usual ‘horror’ stories of air travel – the queues, the delays, the cramped spaces, the crying babies, the lost luggage, the jetlag etc, air travel still manages to enthral me: the adrenalin rush at take-off, the gaze from the window on an ‘exotic’ world below, the guilt-free binge-watching of in-flight movies and the wonderment of traversing the globe and landing in another hemisphere, all within 24 hours. Yet, despite flying being a component of many holiday/VFR/business etc. experiences, social scientists (with some exceptions, e.g. mobility scholars) have been inclined to view the journey as ‘dead time’ and focus their attention on the travel experience at the destination rather than in the air.

It was this neglect of the passenger experience that led me (with Candice Harris from Auckland University of Technology) to an initial investigation of the air passenger experience which has led to the edited book, The Passenger Experience of Air Travel: A Critical Approach. Coming from a critical tourism background and guided by the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, it was clear that more needed to be said about the embodied experiences of passengers, the materialities and technologies that contribute to that experience and the discourses surrounding air travel that give it meaning. Situating air travel within its wider political, economic, cultural and social contexts, unmasking power relations and addressing inequalities were key concerns of the contributors.

With this in mind, the authors explore:

• the passenger experience of airports
• the passenger experience of fellow passengers – their behaviour and appearance as well as their experience of flight attendants’ appearance
• the experience of passengers with a disability – mobility, sensory, cognitive and mental health conditions
• the experience of passengers with a fear of flying
• the attitudes and behaviour of passengers with regards to the sustainability of air travel
• the disruption of the passenger experience during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In calling for change or action within the field of air travel, the writers argue for accessible and inclusive air travel. At the same time, we see the tension between ‘access to air travel’ and the critical environmental concerns associated with flying which must be addressed for the health and wellbeing of the planet. At the least, I hope this book establishes that air travel is a meaningful experience and not ‘dead time’, as some have implied.

For more information about this post please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Histories, Meanings and Representations of the Modern Hotel by Kevin J. James.

Millennials, Generation Z and the Future of Tourism

This month we are publishing Millennials, Generation Z and the Future of Tourism by Fabio Corbisiero, Salvatore Monaco and Elisabetta Ruspini. In this post the authors explain how studying the attitudes, motivations and behaviours of younger tourists can help to identify future trends in tourism.

The famous quote “Savoir pour prévoir et prévoir pour pouvoir” (To know in order to predict, and thus to act) formulated by Auguste Comte during one of his university lectures, fully describes the future-oriented character of sociology, which, since its origins, has been conceived as a discipline aimed at both the study of society and social change. Sharing the idea that foresight is a useful analytical tool to anticipate the society of the future, the book Millennials, Generation Z and the Future of Tourism focuses on the study of tourism and its possible developments as a social phenomenon in the short to medium-long term.

In the book, the exploration of possible and probable futures uses a particular lens: the generational one. In order to forecast the future of tourism demand and facilitate its meeting with supply, the chapters in the book start from the characteristics and needs of the new generations (Millennials, Generation Z and Generation Alpha). Young people are the main actors of social change: they are perfect trendsetters because they link both past, present and future and outline social trends. Thus, studying attitudes, motivations and behaviours of younger tourists is a useful starting point in understanding new travel processes and practices, unprecedented trends in tourism preferences and consumption, new dynamics and meanings attributed to travel.

Beyond the territorial and cultural specificities, some common values and choices that can help the identification of future tourism trends emerge from the analysis.

First, digital technologies have profoundly influenced the travel behaviour of younger tourists: Millennials and members of Gen Z are using new technologies not only to organize and communicate their travel experiences but also to disengage from a mass use of tourist activities and promote sustainable tourism practices. Second, the tourist gaze of future travellers appears to be increasingly attentive to sustainability, authenticity, respect for territories’ material and intangible resource. A third aspect concerns the openness of the new generations to changing gender identities and sexual orientations: they show stronger support for gender egalitarianism and are much more likely to be allies of LGBTQ+ communities than generations before them. The book also focuses on forms of social exclusion in the tourism sector (gender inequalities and discriminations linked to sexual orientation) and tries to understand how the new generations are facing these challenges.

The book brings a new theoretical paradigm to the study of tourism and its future development, emphasising the contribution of the younger generation to the renewal of tourism and its revival after the pandemic. As extensively discussed, tourism has shown itself to be changeable and resilient, even in the face of crises and downtime periods. The post-Covid recovery of tourism flows is a clear example of how tourism never stops, but always finds new and original ways to meet the social need to travel. The same has happened in the past, for example in response to natural disasters or in the face of the scourge of terrorism. Tourism has always renewed itself over time, experimenting with new and novel ways of moving and travelling, and the younger generations play a crucial role in this process of change.

For more information about this book, please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Gamification for Tourism edited by Feifei Xu and Dimitrios Buhalis.