This podcast discusses recent research published in Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment.
We talk with authors about their research contributions to share the why and how of their research.
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This podcast discusses recent research published in Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment.
We talk with authors about their research contributions to share the why and how of their research.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2025.2525815
The commercial spaceflight industry is progressing rapidly. Yet, there is a lack of research theorising what the spatio-temporal contours of sustainability look like if the biosphere, along with its finite resources and limited ability to sustain continued population growth, constitutes a boundary that can be readily transcended. Informed by the concept of sustainable trajectory, this paper presents a conceptual model that extends the traditional spatial (e.g. national, global) and temporal (e.g. near future, intergenerational) scales that sustainability discourses in geography are typically predicated upon. We conducted a critical narrative literature review to analyse the implications of space tourism in the context of sustainable trajectory. Our analysis highlights deep tensions between the perspectives of sustainability typically promulgated in academic spheres and the path dependencies currently being formed by private spaceflight companies.
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2025.2506523?src=
The ‘working holiday’ model of youth mobility has evolved alongside backpacking in recent decades. Increasingly, backpackers on working holidays are seen as a potential labour source in many nations, due to the flexible and highly mobile capacity which suits much agricultural work. We discuss the evolution of Australia’s Working Holiday Maker visa program, which highlights the tensions between tourism, labour, and migration. The term ‘backpacker’ is widely used in Australia interchangeably with the ‘Working Holiday Maker’ visa, identifying both a tourist subculture and what has become an essential migrant worker cohort in horticulture and a staple part of rural tourism and economies. But their presence, and the agricultural industry’s dependence on them, manifests what we identify as a ‘tourism-migration nexus’, that is, where labour chains, tourist flows, and the complexities of bilateral government agreements influence the migration trajectories of these working visitors. We draw on scholarship across backpacking, tourism and migration, in dialogue with recent policy and government inquiries, in order to trace the evolution and changes in the Australian Working Holiday Maker visa and the implications that this has on tourist mobilities as well as longer-term migration journeys.
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2025.2516837
This paper examines the political geography of land use management in developed western economies. It explains why tourism stakeholders continue to struggle to gain legitimacy in many protected area management decisions. The reason is that the politics of public land management, in general, and protected area management, in particular, are highly polarised between well-established stakeholder coalitions that try to influence government policy, but espouse contrasting strong or weak sustainability ideologies. Tourism is a disruptive force that sits awkwardly in this dyad, neither fully belonging to nor alienated from either camp. The net result is that tourism interests are often viewed with suspicion, for while they may share much in common with other stakeholder groups, its unique needs also pose a threat to traditional, long standing inter-organisational coalitions that dominate the politics of public land management. The issue is complicated further by the diverse nature of what ‘tourism’ entails, for the range of commercial activities varies from operators with a strong ecologically based focus, through to higher impact horse and vehicular access tourism and high impact roofed accommodation, resort development and consumptive forms of tourism. As such, tourism stakeholders struggle to gain trust from other stakeholder groups in the political arena.
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Since the launch of Tourism Geographies in 1999, annual international tourist arrivals have surged from 664 million to 1.4 billion, with greater numbers of domestic tourists traversing within borders. Transportation improvements have made travel more efficient, affordable, and accessible, while the digital revolution has introduced social media, the sharing economy, GPS technology, and artificial intelligence to travelers. This forward-thinking collection offers the latest research in tourism geographies, drawing from a collective body of work developed over the last quarter century. During this period, the subfield has evolved from a convergence of geography and tourism studies into a critically engaged, multidisciplinary branch of the social sciences. With roots in social and cultural geography and cultural studies, tourism geographers offer a critical approach to tourism studies, which foregrounds the role of place, space, people, and the environment. This collection illustrates how contemporary tourism geographies scholarship has built on this critical foundation to transcend the disciplinary walls of geography. Tourism geographies has long existed on the verge of disciplinary borders, accounting for the broad range of scholars and scholarship from social science disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, history, environmental studies, and planning, among others. This collection provides essential frameworks for foundational and emerging themes in tourism geographies, deepening understandings of tourism discourse and practice and setting the stage for the subfield’s next act.
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2025.2493776?src=exp-la
This study explores how local communities in Fiji perceive the portrayal of their home in films. Yet little is known how local communities collectively construct and interpret the cinematic representations of their homeland. This is important given the need for local community support for tourism. Through in-depth interviews with 22 Fijian residents, and drawing on social representation theory, the study reveals that locals use anchoring to interpret film depictions through their existing cultural values and experiences. While residents take pride in scenic locations featured in films, they also express disappointment, confusion, and concern over the lack of cultural authenticity and the perpetuation of stereotypes. These social representations shape how locals engage with film-induced tourism and influence their relationships with visiting film-induced tourists. The findings highlight the importance of cultural sensitivity and collaboration with local experts in film production to ensure an accurate and respectful portrayal that aligns with the host community’s collective identity and shared understanding of their land and way of life.
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https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2502997
This paper explores the intersection of dark tourism and spectral geographies, offering a critical examination of how spaces of death, disaster, trauma, and painful memories are shaped by hauntings and spectral presence. Drawing on hauntology and the work of Derrida, as well as on work in spectral geographies, it proposes spectrality not as a metaphor to analyse places connected with literal ghosts and supernatural presence, but as an analytical framework that reconfigures our understanding of temporality, spatiality, and presence within dark tourism sites. This article, as introduction to a collection of works on the nexus between dark tourism and spectral geographies, argues that spectrality offers a qualitative and transformative rethinking of dark tourism, revealing how disruptions in linear understandings of absence and presence, and past-present-future temporalities can produce sites that are emotionally and politically charged, and ethically complex. The collection interrogates how ghostly traces—whether of colonialism, disaster, or ecological loss—complicate linear historical narratives. It positions spectrality as a transformative and generative lens through which to engage with dark tourism’s critical potential in negotiating memory, justice, and intergenerational trauma.
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https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2495179
Macau is a Special Administrative Region (SAR) located in the south of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Settled by the Portuguese it was the last European colony in Asia. Over the centuries as a maritime city Macau saw its fortunes coming as trade boomed in the 16–17th centuries; however, with the establishment of Hong Kong as a port city the importance of Macau decreased. The authorities resorted to gaming and tourism as key sources of tax revenues eventually in 2000s becoming ‘Las Vegas’ of Asia. As the pandemic hit China and the rest of the world, Macau was isolated, gaming revenues declined temporarily and the Macau authorities decided to diversify its offer of tourist attractions. Although Macau has already been recognised as a UNESCO heritage site with a well-preserved historic core since 2005, two new attractions were developed to help reposition Macau as a city with a rich cultural history. The two new sites that opened in 2023 were the long abandoned Iec Long firecracker factory (益隆炮竹厂) in Taipa and dilapidated Lai Chi Vun shipyards in Coloane. Iec Long firecracker factory is unique, as it blends an interface with nature (green space dominated by the century old trees), a public space and interpretative displays of how the industrial activities were performed. In this paper we use mixed methods approach to provide a ‘thick description’ of Iec Long firecracker factory as an interplay of affective and material elements. Drawing on the existing literature we further advance how assemblage thinking can contribute to analysis of industrial heritage sites as tourist attractions. Additionally, drawing on the first-hand empirical data and the context of ongoing urban revitalization in Macau we scrutinise heritage-tourism dichotomy and demonstrate how we can better understand the meanings of heritage co-created from below.
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2025.2462222
Over the past twenty-five years, conceptualisations regarding where, when and how tourists travel have undergone profound changes. For many years, surveys, maps relying on tourists’ recall, and physical surveillance were the only means through which the mobility of tourists could be tracked. The internet, cellular phone networks and satellite-based technology has facilitated new methods to collect data, including Bluetooth tracking, Wi-Fi tracking, mobile phone data, social media and GPS location-based data. It has also facilitated new forms of data, including big data, real-time data collection and continuous tracking data. Moreover, it has enabled new forms of data analysis including automation, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. As a result of these innovations, researchers have extended theoretical knowledge within tourism geographies, particularly in relation to tourists’ spatiotemporal activity including visitation patterns, activity within specific locations, dispersal patterns and the impact of mobility upon emotions. This paper reviews the history of tourist tracking over the last 25 years, along with conceptual findings that have emerged from innovations in technology. It argues that there have been four stages of tourist tracking, namely: the pre-technology era, the tourist tracking 1.0 era characterised by the emergence of Global Positioning Systems technology, the tourist tracking 2.0 era whereby mobile phone, internet, and location-based technologies were developed, and the recent 3.0 era that is characterised by artificial intelligence, physiological sensors, mobile eye tracking and real time tracking. The paper concludes by highlighting future research needs, including predictive analysis, ethical considerations and use of tracking technology to encourage activity change.
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https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2412550
Digital volunteer tourism (DVT) has emerged as a viable alternative to positively impact destinations when travel is impossible during times of crisis. This leaves volunteers, the ‘agents’ in volunteer projects and development work, who might often identify with a destination or specific cause, without a tangible link to the locality. Raising the important question of what role being physically connected to the locality plays in voluntourism; this study focuses on volunteers’ perception of their own impact in an out-of-reach destination. Through online fieldwork during an eight-week internship with a volunteer organisation in Fiji, this paper offers first insights into the phenomenon of digital voluntourism by discussing the role that a link to the destination and a sense of place play in still feeling to be making a difference. Furthermore, this debate reveals whether and how DVT intends to stimulate a sense of belonging of those volunteers to foster their sense of responsibility, while juxtaposing these digital programmes to in-situ voluntourism. This paper, therefore, constitutes one of the first contributions conceptualising the geography of digital voluntourism, arguing that while DVT has its merits in contributing to the sustainable development agenda, the physical distance and isolation from the place where this impact should be felt compromise their feelings of achievement and understanding of the locality even more than in usual voluntourism projects.
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Abstract
How effective are podcasts in disseminating academic research and engaging audiences beyond traditional scholarly channels? This study investigates the Tourism Geographies Podcast to assess its value as a research communication tool. The objectives were to explore how podcast participation shaped academics’ approaches to dissemination, the visibility and feedback they received, and the comparative benefits of podcasting over conventional outputs. Data were collected from 29 podcast guests across three seasons through written, audio, and interview responses (29.9% response rate). Thematic analysis revealed three main outcomes: the need for simplification and clarity, greater awareness of diverse audiences, and enhanced reflexivity about the broader relevance of research. While large-scale professional impacts were limited, participants reported increased visibility, recognition, and confidence in public engagement. Podcasts were consistently valued as accessible, conversational, and democratic. These findings suggest that podcasting fosters knowledge translation and offers a participatory, socially responsive complement to traditional dissemination. This algins closely with and contributes to the emerging field of Digital Humanities and Social Science.
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2025.2462777
The polar areas have long endured as an exotic playground for adventure in the wilderness. Tourism figures have remained low and hence the regions hold a marginal position in the global tourism system. Today, climate change and its significant impact on ecosystems and communities in high latitudes as well as geopolitical change drive attention to the polar regions. Increasing tourist numbers manifest this. While early travel records and diaries are an integral part of the history of exploration, academic research into tourism cannot be found to any greater degree prior to the 1980s This review highlights major traits in polar tourism research to date and identifies potential avenues for future research within the field. It shows that polar tourism research is a well-established orientation for tourism research today. However, great variations are in place, and far-fetched generalizations about the two polar regions are growing increasingly problematic. In this context, geographical perspectives should be utilized in order to understand polar tourism and its repercussions in a wider context of development, on different geographical scales, and even beyond the polar regions.
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2381071
The pandemic has drawn attention to the unsustainable nature of tourism, intensifying social and economic inequalities and heightening issues of urban vulnerability. As destinations reimagine their future, a holistic approach that addresses social and ecological perspectives through collaboration, stewardship and environmental ethics is required. Regenerative tourism enables destination communities to develop new ways of thinking and build the capability and capacity to work towards embedding tourism practices and ecological processes that advocate human and non-human health and wellbeing. As the tourist-historic city of York, United Kingdom emerged from the pandemic, practice-led regenerative development was evident in the city’s framework for post-Covid recovery and renewal. Semi-structured interviews with leading stakeholders identified how communities can build sustainable city ecologies through living systems thinking, evidenced through collaborative models of engagement. In York, the pandemic catalysed community stewardship and a re-orientation towards a more inclusive tourism environment. This research demonstrates how regenerative practice principles manifest in the interconnections and the networks that support the distinctive qualities and needs of York’s local communities. The study also contributes to understanding how regenerative tourism approaches support cultural revival, as evident in York. Such approaches to tourism management in historic cities highlights the transformative potential of practice-led regenerative development as a tool for addressing tourism development concerns in urban spaces.
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2017.1385094
To assess tourist motivations at the battlefield site on Kinmen Island of Taiwan, an empirical investigation was conducted. From a convenience sample, we collected 437 effective responses of respondents including domestic and international tourists with different cultural background in Kinmen. The structure of motivation was first examined via factor analysis. Then ANOVA analysis was applied to address the influence from demographic aspects such as gender, age, and nationality. Our results show that personal, spiritual, experience, physical, and emotional perspectives are five major sources of motivations. More importantly, age and nationality are confirmed to be two major dimensions to segment tourists in the context of battlefield tourism. Tourists with older age have higher motivations toward the battlefield site in comparison with young tourists. In addition, tourists with different cultural background based on different nationalities are significantly motivated by various motivational factors. The example of Kinmen contributes theoretically to a better understanding of the motivational attributes in a battlefield site, and how they represent a basis for increasing tourist perceptions. The motivational mechanisms and factors explored in this case can be incorporated into marketing strategies. Additionally, our results also provide a viable basis for the tourism authorities concerned to reevaluate the essence of its tourism industry in the context of battlefield resources and attractions.
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2025.2464101
This study analyzed tourism history, management, and impacts in the city of Asheville in Western North Carolina, a prime tourism location for over a century. First marketed for its healthful mountain air in the mid-1800s, its proximity to the famed Blue Ridge Mountains remains one of the city’s major attractions. Over the years, Asheville expanded its tourism opportunities and now sits atop dozens of ‘Top 10’ lists. With over 10 million annual visitors, residents have expressed concerns about the repercussions of tourism, including increased cost of living, decreased quality of life, impaired access to natural and cultural sites, and degraded ecosystems. This research explored tourism management and its impacts in Asheville and on residents through an extensive literature review and interviews. Using a regenerative tourism lens, this study developed recommendations for Asheville’s tourism management. To address the growing overtourism repercussions, it is recommended that Asheville take steps toward more sustainable and regenerative tourism management and development. Proposed solutions are presented, including implementing a sustainability pledge, creating a destination stewardship management body, engaging the community, redistributing occupancy tax revenue, and educating visitors. These proposed solutions may apply not only to the situation in Asheville, North Carolina, but also in similarly sized tourism destinations globally that are striving for resilient, regenerative tourism.
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2330574
This review summarizes some key moments in the development of ethics in tourism research and practice where three main areas of concern are identified: socio-economic inequalities, cultural discriminations, and more-than-human speciesism. Following a brief historical review, the paper delves into some current trends and ethical concerns in tourism geographies, which trace back to the utilitarian ethics within which contemporary tourism emerged, after which, and with the growing concerns about tourism’s negative impacts, normative and moral approaches to ethics held sway. Then the paper addresses a critical gap in tourism ethics’ research and practice. With few exceptions, tourism environments are seen as something apart, things to be managed, developed or even protected, where the focus is instrumental on how these environments can be maintained or manipulated for human benefit. This modernization paradigm and its promise of progress through growth, together with a tourism industry that (re)produces colonial structures through neocolonial practices reinforced by neoliberal globalization has contributed to a host of present-day challenges and injustices. We argue that to address the injustices above and current existential crises like climate change, and other threats to socio-ecological well-being, a paradigm shift in tourism thinking is needed. Specifically, we propose embracing posthumanist ethics as a novel, experimental (as against normative or moral), situated (as against universal), and affirmative (as against oppositional) critique of structural injustices and structural power; epistemological pluralism (as against essentialism), acknowledging the relationality proper of indigenous cosmologies and other traditional knowledges (where more involvement from the Global South is needed); and a new materialist ontology that overcomes human exceptionalism and abandons oppositional binary thinking. In other words, what is needed, is an affirmative posthumanist ethics for tourism that is relational, plural and differential.
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2446354
The ‘turn to the sea’ through yachting tourism recorded during the Covid-19 pandemic prompts the relocation of the sea, including its nature and culture, back at the centre of processes of change in selected coastal resorts. The recent revamp of regenerative thinking in tourism offers a theoretical and practical ground on which to consider the development potential of yachting tourism as agent of societal change and coastal resort evolution. Using the Northern Adriatic Sea as a geographical point of reference, and Rimini as an exemplary model of second-generation coastal resort, we used a constructivist variant of grounded theory. Findings show that in the Northern Adriatic Sea area some favourable conditions do exist for the YT sector to contribute to reconnecting humans with the nature and culture of the sea confirming its regenerative tourism potential. Nevertheless, formal efforts to support the needed for a cultural shift, from international agencies to local administration, are undermined by a culture of the sea that is fragmented by the disjointed agendas of distinct sea communitas.
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https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2423155
This commentary reviews the state of island tourism literature with specific reference to publications in the journal Tourism Geographies. Despite over 44 years of literature about island tourism, the field remains underdeveloped, with several under-researched critical areas, including adaptation, investment, proximity, and small islands. The Western Hemisphere, except the Caribbean, is the most under-researched area for island tourism. Some important island tourism topics include community, culture, disaster, governance, and tour operators. A focused compendium about island tourism is needed to support the sustainability and resilience of these vulnerable and fragile landscapes that are perhaps the most constrained in terms of economic opportunities for viability. A recommendation has been made for the furtherance of island tourism as a separate field within the tourism academy.
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2446355
Today’s multiple crises call for alternative approaches to tourism and nature contemplation. Neoliberal conservation proposes the commodification of nature as a solution to these crises, for instance, through tourism development in private protected areas (PPA). PPAs combine privatisation with the commodification of nature for tourism, illustrating neoliberal conservation. Critics of neoliberal conservation question these practices, claiming that they foster inequality, enclosure, and people’s alienation from nature, leading to displacement. Alternatively, post-capitalist convivial conservation strives to overcome the human-nature dichotomy entrenched in market-based instruments of mainstream conservation. This study analyses tourism management in PPAs in the Serra the Tramuntana, a protected mountain range in the tourist hotspot Mallorca (Spain). The objective is to clarify whether PPAs can align with convivial conservation by supporting decommodification and commons management. A qualitative method based on interviews and participant observation is used to conceptualise decommodification based on the commons. The results demonstrate that PPAs can contribute to the decommodification of nature contemplation and tourism when responsibility and decision-making are shared through commoning. This paper argues for rethinking tourism through a convivial conservation lens, offering a post-capitalist alternative to mainstream conservation and tourism practices by emphasising commoning as a pathway to decommodify nature.
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2381061
This state-of-the art review provides an overview of feminist analyses of tourism that have been published in Tourism Geographies since 1999. The review first introduces feminisms as political projects, forms of activism, diverse theories, and as ways of knowing that have critically informed tourism knowledge production. It then offers reflections on the development of feminist tourism geographies over the past two to three decades, before outlining several trends that have more recently contributed to feminist understandings of tourism spaces and places. Our review then identifies avenues for future research and for cross-fertilisation between tourism geographies scholarship and scholarship relating to indigenous and decolonial feminisms, feminist political ecologies, and feminist economic geographies.
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