Pathways to post-capitalist tourism

05/17/24 • 60 min

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Bordering, ordering and othering through tourism: the tourism geographies of borders

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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Next Episode

The ‘awkward’ geopolitics of tourism in China’s ‘Arctic’ village

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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