Emerging Research Themes for Tourism: Insights from Geography

The annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) is held every Spring. In 2011 in was held in Seattle, April 12-16. In the previous fall there are a plethora of CFPs (Call for Papers) from people who are organizing paper sessions. I am personally on several geography email lists, including UrbGeog (urban geography), EconomicGeography, CulturalGeog, and LeftGeog, in addition to the email list of the Recreation, Tourism and Sport (RTS) Specialty Group in the AAG.  

As an avid academic geographer, I find many of these CFPs (certainly not all of them) to be very thoughtfully written and informative in themselves.  And, more importantly, they are often (certainly not always) at the cutting edge of research thought in my home discipline of geography.

In fact, I often find the geography CFPs more compelling that those that are written for tourism sessions at the AAG.  Because of that, I collected some 100 CFPs for last year’s meeting and culled through them to find the most interesting topics that academic tourism geographers should be studying (IMHO of course).  I grouped the 100 CFPs into the three topic areas below. Here is a selection of some of the more compelling research topics that I came up with:

TOPIC AREA 1 – Economic and Urban Geography

1.       City Image – This is an old theme in tourism research that seems to be re-emerging in the geographic literature. Some of the key concepts being discussed include: global cities, sustainable cities, declining cities, postcolonial cities, spatial inequality, urban political economy, nature in the city, urban boosterism, cities in film and new or social media, city landscape, place identities as commodities, and comparing neoliberal  and conventional  forms of place marketing, including architectural, social, textual, and sensual  branding.

2.       City Hubs and Networks – This is also a concept that has been around for awhile in travel and tourism studies, though not a major part of the field. Emerging geography research is still looking at the idea of transportation hubs (air and sea), but also extending that into “brainports” (aka “centers of competence”), the influence of municipalities on regional policies related to theorizing policy networks, sustainability and environmental governance, transnational networking and sociotechnical regimes related to global civil society and NGOs, and the new geographies of global production networks focusing on the relationships between small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and international corporations.

3.       Mobile Technologies and Place – This is, of course, a major new area of emerging activity and research. As such we are still evolving ways to study it. Geographers are interested in: how mobile devices change the spatial and temporal flexibility of individuals and organizations; how they change the ways in which material places are used and perceived; how technology transforms social and spatial relations, affects social identification, and transforms state-society and nature-society relations; and how information, communication and telecommunication technologies are becoming (or not) integrated into the everyday practices of businesses and households -- and with what socioeconomic consequences.

TOPIC AREA 2 – Cultural and Political Geography

4.       Everyday Culture and Experiences – This has long been a topic of interest among cultural geographers, but has been addressed much less by tourism researchers. It includes tangible or artistic aspect of culture; folk and popular culture; visual and performing arts; uses of space and place in music lyrics, television plot lines, movies and film, contemporary novels, graphic novels and short fiction; social space and resistance on the internet. Overall it is the everyday practice of making the world habitable and providing for our needs, which are based on relationships among subjectivity, identity and place.

5.       Multicultural Peoples – This is a popular topic in the broader social sciences that tourism researchers have touched upon to some degree. Topics include multicultural people's sense of place and the various belongings they have to where they grew up, where they live, where they travel, and where their ancestors were from. Also of interest are the intersections of race with gender, class, religion, and space; spatialities of post-racial thinking; and the growing diversity in both metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas the developed world.

6.       People Mobilities - The multicultural peoples topic is related to the growing mobility of people worldwide. This topic presents many geographic research themes, including: the search for alternative mobility futures; slow movements; borders and their surveillance and securitization; embodied performances and affective mobility; friction, turbulence and rhythms of movement; mobile and locative social media and electronic gaming; and imaginary and virtual travel. Also of related interest are how class, gender, sexuality, are ethnicity are enacted, (re)produced and potentially transformed in mobile practices by individuals and their social relations, experiences, mobile strategies, and identities. At another level are issues of freedom of movement, challenges and changes in the global system of migration controls, and “no borders” politics in an era of rising anti-immigrant sentiment.

TOPIC AREA 3 – Planning and Sustainable Places

      7.       Green Economies – Sustainable tourism is a very popular topic for tourism research, but the broader geography research on the green economy still brings some new ideas, including: new forms of green commodification and the rapidly expanding markets on which these are traded; developing spaces of the green economy; the work of creating ‘sustainable’ cities, transportation networks, waste management systems, and alternative/renewable energy; how ‘green jobs’ differ from traditional jobs; green urbanism; Foucault's apparatus (dispositive; institutions that support power structures); and the political economy and material processes of the green economy.

      8.       Ethical Practice – This is a topic that is very new among tourism researchers, and has probably been better addressed by geographers. Major themes include: issues of civil, political and social rights, what might be called "place rights" or a "right to place" as an entitlement of citizenship, and what constitutes these place-based rights, theoretically and in practice; policy implications that arise from normative scholarship and practice; caring approaches to social theory; human rights and geographic place; defining hegemonies and counter-hegemonies; accommodation and subversion within social movements; meaning and materiality in societal mobilization; similarities between red and green social movements – and, of course, their relationship to tourism development.

As you might guess, there were many other topics among the AAG Call for Papers. Each of the topics above is based on three to four different CFPs. I am sure other academic disciplines have a lot that they can inform our tourism research. For me, I am glad to be a geographer as I find the entire discipline to be immensely stimulating and informative for my personal tourism research.

The Sustainable Tourism Conundrum: Would you Stop Traveling to Save the Planet?

Would you stop traveling to save the planet? That is the challenge of sustainable tourism! #aag2011


I posted that on Twitter on April 13, 2011 while listening to a presentation at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers.  It was my most re-tweeted post at the conference, and one of the most re-tweeted of all of the #AAG2011 tagged posts.
The comment was written in response to a presentation by Antti Honkanen (University of Eastern Finland), titled Sustainability and the democratization of tourism - The limits of growth in travelling abroad.

Antti presented the essential conundrum for all of us who love to travel, but are also concerned about the major negative impacts that humans are having on the environment. That it was re-tweeted by several other people indicates, to me, that many of us are troubled by this issue.
Here is a edited and shortened version of Antti's presentation abstract (from the online AAG 2011 program) -

• Does everyone, if wealthy enough, need to be a tourist? Or are we starting to reach some limits of growth for tourism?
  
  This paper asks whether the propensity to spend a holiday abroad has reached its limit for growth in some social or geographical groups, based on age, income, socioeconomic status, education, gender and country of residence. The study is based on survey data from Eurobarometer 25 (1985), Eurobarometer 48.0 (1997) and Flash Eurobarometer 258 (2008).
  
  According to the results, while differences exist, travelling abroad has become more common among all groups over the years 1985-2008. The democratization of tourism appears to be continuing, even if some lower societal groups are left out due to increasing social inequality. The propensity to travel abroad for their main vacation holiday has increased in almost all countries. Some limits of growth, however, may be seen among the upper classes.

Basically, her study of Europe found that more and more people are traveling internationally (at least through 2008), except maybe at the very bottom of the economic ladder (where they cannot afford it), and at the very top of society (maybe because they have already been everywhere?).  And this data was for Europe, which is generally far more environmentally conscious than most of the rest of the world!

The apparent answer to my Twitter post is "No" - we (including myself) are not willing to stop traveling to save the planet.

We are willing to tweak how we travel (using hybrid cars or developing alternative airplane fuels), and we are willing to pay a little more to try and compensate for our impacts (staying in ecolodges or paying to plant trees), but we are not willing to stop traveling -- which would have the biggest impact on reducing CO2 levels.

Of course, if we stopped traveling we would also have a huge impact on the livelihood of all the workers and businesses that are involved, to varying degrees, in the the fifth or sixth largest industry worldwide (which is what I have estimated the size of the tourism industry to be).

And that is the Sustainable Tourism Conundrum -- how to balance the Economics impacts of tourism (usually considered good) with its Environmental impacts (mostly considered bad). There are a lot of other cultural ans social issues related to sustainability and tourism, but I believe that the economic-environment tension is its most fundamental challenge.

ReVista -- Tourism in the Americas

From the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (Harvard University)

Published in 2002, this free (donations requested) online publication contains some 30 short articles written by well known names among tourism academics. It is sort of a mini-online book. Worth checking out, especially if you are interested in Latin America.

Why Don't We Blog? University Faculty Blogging about Travel & Tourism

Last Updated: 30 June 2007

I have been somewhat involved, but very interested, in a recent discussion on the podcast, Six Pixels of Separation, on the topic of university faculty blogs.

• Six Pixels of Separation podcast #50 - blog - mp3 file - 6 May 2007;
  and #51 - blog - mp3 file - 13 May 2007

One of the "complaints" about academia is that it is very conservative and a late adopter of new technology, and in fact discourages faculty members from using new technology, such as social software or social media. A big part of that discussion is trying to figure out how social media would fit into the very traditional approaches to academic review and assessments of productivity. There are several sources that discuss these issues; here are a few:

• Academic Productivity » Soft peer review? Social software and distributed scientific evaluation
• Technical solutions: Evolving peer review for the internet
• Faculty blogs: Good idea or Bad idea? (and a more recent comment by the same author on libraries and blogs)
  

Despite these discussion, there are a lot of university faculty who are blogging about their disciplinary specialties, research activities, and teaching. These two links provide examples of university faculty blogs

• Professors Who Blog (not updated since 28 July 2006, some are no longer activee)
• All The Web search results on "university professor faculty blogs"

Looking at the web search results, you would think that almost all Law professors are blogging. Public policy faculty would be a distant second. However, the 150 blogs listed on the Professors Who Blog site shows predominance in the Humanities, though many other disciplines are represented, as well.

I have been blogging for almost two years now, prompted by my daughter, and starting with a trip diary. Since then I have started a couple other trip diary blogs, a couple of research and teaching related blogs, and I have had my students blogging in my classes. My podcasts evolved directly from my blogs.

• Alan A. Lew's Blogs & Podcasts - some are more active than others
  

DO YOU BLOG?

While there are quite a few interesting blogs about tourism and the travel industry, I had not seen any blogs by other tourism academics in the two years that I have bee doing this. In fact, blogging (which is celebrating its 10th year as a word 1997) is almost considered "old technology" is the realm of social software. So one would think that more tourism academics would be doing it.

So prompted by the discussions on Six Pixels of Separation, and with the Spring semester having ended, I sent an email out on 20 May 2007 to several discussion lists that are frequented by tourism professors and graduate students. These lists included Trinet, IGU Tourism Commission, AAG RTS Specialty Group, Tourism Anthropology, and Asia Tourism Research. Accounting for some duplication (people on more than one list), I guestimate that some 1000 people received my query: "Do You Blog?" Here is a summary of the responses that I got.

NOT-YET-BLOGGERS

• One person told me that she has not blogged, but would like to if she only had the time. (I can certainly identify with that!)
• Glenn Croy (Monash) told me that Monash University is encouraging their faculty to blog "so as another way to promote our programme, especially to potential students. Encouraged is in the literal meaning, that it is not being forced upon us, though if we are interested this is something
  we can do and our marketing people will support us in this."
  
  • This seems to be a growing phenomenon, as seen in this example from Ohio Dominion University.

BLOGGING ABOUT TOURISM

• Fabian Frenzel (Leeds Metropolitan) - Recently started a collaborative blog on the New Economics of Tourism that is based in the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change at Leeds Metropolitan University.
• New Economics of Tourism N.E.T.
  
• Dimitrios Buhalis (Surrey) - Comments on tourism and his personal academic experiences. Although started in 2005, it has only been in the past month of so that he has been posting more regularly. Not a lot there yet, but show much promise.
  
  • Dimitrios Journeys
    
• Two of my (Alan A. Lew, Northern Arizona) own blogs fall under this category
  
  • Web 2.0 Travel Tools - where I review interesting websites that are transforming the travel experience and tourism industry
  • Tourism Place - where I am posting this blog, and occasionally post tourism things that don't quite fit anywhere else. I originally created this with the intent of making it a collaborative blog. If anyone want to be a contributor to it, let me know.

BLOGGING FOR CLASSES & STUDENTS

• Wes Roehl (Temple) has been experimenting with using a collaborative blog to encourage interaction among the graduate students in his tourism program. All of the grad students in the program were members of the blog and could post to it, though not all of them did. He is currently rethinking how to make it more effective.
  
  • Tourism Grad Student Network
• Bruce Wicks (Illinois, C-U) is currently in Poland with five students study abroad students from the University of Illinois, and looking at tourism. They set up a blog for friends and family to follow their adventure. He said "Frankly I can't imagine anything better than a blog to record a trip. This time we have only some text and pictures but we are also taking video for a YouTube entry when we get back, and in the future will explore audio uploads."
  
  • Poland Blog 07
• I (Alan A. Lew, Northern Arizona) have had students blogging, and recently podcasting, in a couple of the tourism classes that I teach. In one class, each student creates their own personal blog site. In the other class, they work in collaborative blogs.
  For this past semester, these collaborative can be found here:
  
  • Sustainable Tourism and the Environment
  • Sustainable Tourism and Money
  • Sustainable Tourism and Community

RESEARCH (and) BLOGS

• Mike Pesses (California State U, Northridge) presented a paper at the 2007 AAG in San Francisco on authenticity in the bicycle tourism experience, which was based on a content analysis of posting on a bicycle touring blog site. You can hear a recording of his presentation here.
  
• Peter Bolan (Ulster), has created a blog to generate discussions around research questions related to movie-based tourism for his Ph.D. research. He has been successful in creating a community and generating a fair amount of reader comments:
  
• Movie Tourism Group
  
• George F. Roberson (Massachusetts, Amherst) has created a blog site to facilitate his forthcoming Fulbright research in Tangier, Morocco, which will focus on current issues of modernization and cultural transformation of the city. His blog is currently mostly used as a repository for articles and resources.
  
• Space and Place
• Emma Stewart (Calgary), and her supervisor, Diane Draper, is using a blog to post preliminary research research and solicit feedback on her work with three Arctic Canadian communities. This blog was just launched last week:
  
  • Churchill - This older site has generated some comments from area residents
  • Cambridge Bay - This new site has not yet generated comments
    
• Carmen Cox (Southern Cross) is not a blogger, but is involved in a research/consulting project in NSW, Australia that will look at the impact of user-content generated travel sites (blogs included) on people's travel planning and trip behavior.
• Chin Ee Ong and Hilary du Cros (Institute for Tourism Studies, Macao) are presenting a paper titled "Almond Biscuit Tasting at St Paul’s Ruins and Camping on Hac-Sa Beach: A Blogspace Study of Mainland Chinese Budget Heritage Tourists in Macao" at the Heritage and Tourism Conference (8-11 July 2007, Guangzhou, China) in which they look at blogs and forums in English and Chinese regarding tourist's and potential tourist's views of Macau.
  
• I have heard of FIVE tourism research papers that at based on the analysis of personal travel blogs. Because these blogs are public, they are readily available as primary research data. (Both of the papers that I have heard of are under review for publication, so they cannot be cited here. I will add them if/when they are accepted for publication.)
  

PERSONAL TRAVEL BLOGS

• Michael Luck (Auckland UT) recently finished his first travel blog about a trip he tool to Thailand.
  
  • Thailand 2007
• Daniela Schilcher (University of Otago) keeps a travel blog for family and friends.
• Pham Hong Long (Vietnam National U, Hanoi) occasionally blogs about his graduate education and personal interests.
  
• I (Alan A. Lew, Northern Arizona) also have three travel blogs based on trips that I have made. I tend to continue blogging on those sites, though not regularly, about tourism, my research, and other issues in those destination areas.
  
  • Golden Triangle Conference and Travels - my first blog in summer 2005. I now update it occasionally with news items from that region.
  • Asia Travels, Tourism and More - originally based trips to Singapore and Thailand, I re-titled this blog to also include my subsequent trips to Malaysia, Nepal and other areas of Asia. The Nepal entries focus on a field research project undertaken their in 2007.
    
  • Australia Travel Blog - I experimented with two different websites that host travel blogs for this 2006 family trip:
  • VCarious.com
  • MyLifeOfTravel.com
    

PODCAST BLOGS

• Martin Fluker (Victoria, Melbourne) has a blog that supports his travel podcast on the ThePodcasterNetwork (TPN). His podcast is closely related to his teaching activities, and includes interviews with students about their travels and travel-related podcasts created by his students. He has also has some CAUTHE presentations on his show.
  
  • The Travel Show
  • Martin also had the following comments to make: "The Travel Show site contains blogs and podcasts to do with tourism. I produce the majority of the podcasts, however, my students are invited to submit the podcasts they produce, in subjects I coordinate, to The Travel Show. The latest podcast (#039) if from my students doing BHO3437 Destination Planning and Development. This subject is being run in Australia and Germany and both groups of students are producing podcasts. I use some of the podcasts on The Travel Show, such as the recording of Prof. Sam Ham, as part of the course material in BHO3437. I also use some podcasts, such as #038 as a way to encourage students to become exchange students. One of the benefits I have gained from podcasting is the winning of an Apple scholarship to attend the 2007 World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco."
    
    
• I (Alan A. Lew, Northern Arizona) have a similar blog for my Geography for Travelers podcast. Topics covered include research that I am involved in, lecture material related to my classes, recordings of conference presentations by both me and others, and podcasts by my students.
  
  • Geography for Travelers
    

NON-ACADEMIC BLOGGERS

A few non-academics also responded to my "Do You Blog?" query.

• Richard Linington told me about the Planning Solutions Blog by the Planning Solutions Consulting Limited (PSCL) -- "specialist research and development company working in the fields of tourism, recreation and leisure." The blog has news about tourism, mostly in the UK, but occasionally beyond, as well.
• Joe Kelly of the Icarus Foundation in Canada told me of their blog on tourism and climate change - Up In The Air. They discuss news items, as well as approaches to mitigation and adaptation.
• Rinzing Lama works in the tourism industry in New Delhi, India, and maintains a blog about his homeland of Sikkim - Blog and Travel Journal.

EMAIL LISTS AS BLOGS

Email Lists are clearly the more common approach to social information sharing and discussion among academics than blogs. They are very different, though, and I am hesitant to put them in the same category as blogs. However, it is possible to use discussion lists postings as a form of collaborative (multiple contributors) blog.

• An example of this is David Dillard's (Temple) NetGold discussion list on YahooGroups.com. The purpose of NetGold is to share "important, informative and useful Internet and sometimes other resources for learning and improvement of skills." Tourism and hospitality are only a small part of the many topics covered:
  
  • Tourism content on Net-Gold
  • Hospitality Content on Net-Gold
  • He apparently distills some of this information on two resources sites for Tourism and Hospitality.
    
    
• Related to this is the Dark Tourism Forum, (hosted at Central Lancashire) which is both a website and an email discussion list. The website is used to develop a resources of material that is discussed on the email list. Again, this is sort of like a collaborative blog, but one with a strong moderator/editor role (the person who decides what moved from the open email discussion to the website).
  

Both of these email lists are more than just email lists (like the ones I posted my "Do You Blog?" query to. But, I do not consider them blogs because they do not fully represent the voice of particular individuals. Even with collaborative blogs, each contributing blogger usually has a distinct and identifiable identity, and each blog entry is treated as an indelible (and searchable) contribution to our world of knowledge and opinion. Email posting are searchable, though depending on the list it can be very difficult to do.

CONCLUSIONS

The diversity of blogging among this small group of tourism academics is quite amazing. There are blogs about tourism, blogs by and for students, research related blogs, and personal travel blogs. There may be even more personal blogs that are not related to tourism, but I think those fall beyond the reaches of this survey. While not a formally constructed survey, the small number of responses confirms the my previous anectodal impressions that tourism academics are not blogging.

Why do I blog? Because it is fun. Blogging enables me to communicating with a whole new audience -- a more real world audience beyond the ivory towers of academia. I meet interesting people through the blogs, and I love looking at the little map on some of my blog pages showing where in the world my readers are reading from. It does cut into my research writing, and does not yet contribute to my annual evaluations. That would be a challenge for most younger faculty, unfortunately. One of my blogs did get me an invitation to speak at a travel industry workshop in Seattle, though the timing did not work. In social media terms, blogging (and podcasting) is helping me to develop my "brand." In fact, when I first started blogging, I used a pseudonym. Today, however, I put my name everywhere I can.

Should more tourism academics blog? I think yes. Tourism is an incredibly important sector of the world economy. Yet the study of tourism is shunned as insignificant by most traditional and established disciplines. Perhaps that is why the relatively small number of tourism academics tend to be inward looking and prefer talking to each other rather than the larger world of academia and beyond. I have done, and still do that myself, and there are benefits from it. However, just as teaching helps balance the different intensity of writing and research, blogging helps bring a balance to the cloistered life of academics.

---

NEW (July 2007): Analysis of blogs for strategy development in tourism

"On Thursday, July 12th 2007, the first worldwide conference for "Blogs in Tourism" took place, for which international experts and numerous participants came to Kitzbühel, Germany. The conference was organised by Krems Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, Kitzbühel Tourismus and the Charles Darwin University, Australia and dealt with the analysis of the content of tourism blogs and forums, the understanding of the process of information exchange and the development of industry strategies for handling these virtual communities."

NEW (17Dec 07): Colleges Are Reluctant to Adopt New Publication Venues

...But, report from the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative argues "that in four to five years, academe will accept as scholarship this kind of interactive online material and will develop methods for evaluating it."

NEW (23Jan 08): Tired of 'Science by Press Release'? Try Science by Blog

ResearchBlogging.org, launched yesterday, is essentially a blog aggregator. Blogging academics (or, apparently, laymen interested in peer-reviewed research) register their blogs with the site. Bloggers can flag certain posts they write about peer-reviewed research by inserting a snippet of code. These posts then appear on the main page of the site, replete with proper academic citation.

...This, evidently, is part of the growing effort to ease communication in the research community, à la Big Think.

NEW (28Jan 08): A couple of related journal articles that may be of interest:

• Hookway, N. (2008) 'Entering the blogosphere': some strategies for using blogs in social research. Qualitative Research, 8(1): 91-113.
• Lin, Y.S. & Huang, J.Y. (2006). Internet Blogs as a Tourism Marketing Medium: A case study. Journal of Business Research, pp. 1201-1205.

Introduction + Purpose + Invitation

This is the start of a new Collaborative Blog on the topic of Tourism and Geography. The focus is on topics and commentaries that are primarily of interest to those who do research on the topic of tourism from a geographic perspective. The geographic perspective provdes a focus on topics that relate to (1) place development and experience, (2) the movement of people, ideas and things through geographic space, and (3) the relationship between the human and physical world. Since I consider most of tourism to be geographically based, this blog can potentially encompasses a broad range of interdisciplinary research topics and interests from across the social sciences, physical sciences and business fields of study. Anyone who has an interest in these topics can contribute to this blog by simply contacting me at TravelGeographer@gmail.com.