Resources

RESOURCES


RESOURCES: PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS

Author : Patricia Johnson
School/Work Place : University of Newcastle, Australia
Contact : Patricia.Johnson@newcastle.edu.au
Year : 2009

Introduction: Nurturing effective intercultural dialogue through tourism has been positioned to be an emergent challenge to tourism professionals working toward sustainability in a globalised world (Robinson and Picard 2006). This interdisciplinary study devises inroads into ways of addressing this challenge through ‘reading’ the language of cosmopolitanism as it appears in writings about tourism and travel. When one writes about travel a journey into the cosmos is documented which is a socio-cultural imagining of self and other. These writings can be highly influential on the reading (and potentially travelling) public and they are positioned as informing the development of global citizenry literacy. As cultural texts they recount an engagement in, and with, cosmopolitanism by way of a cosmopolitical gaze. This paper is drawn from a wider study which examines linkages between cosmopolitanism and cultural literacy by formulating a conceptual framework to ‘read’ cultural orientations through discourse and ideology. The study examines women’s travel writing to Iran in a specific time period: between 1979 (the Islamic Revolution) and 2002 (President Bush’s State of the Union address that positioned Iran in the ‘Axis of Evil’). This timeframe marks a period of uncertainty – a liminal period marred by crisis which gave rise to negative discursive frameworks that have been ‘normalised’ in Western cultural thought. Key discourses are identified by discerning patterns of convention in the ways the authors frame their narrative and position the foreign within this framework.

Method: This study adopts a poststructuralist, social constructivist research design which views travel and the travel text as sign, discourse and representation. The study draws from texts set within a chronological frame and uses the cultural studies lens of liminality to examine data. Liminality provides a way to explore the language of cosmopolitanism in that it has the potential to cast light on the cosmopolitical by revealing how the self and ‘other’ are imagined. This method positions ‘reality’ as socially constructed and studies discourse in historical and cosmopolitical contexts. Elements of a feminist paradigm are incorporated through its concern about relationships of gender and power. Scapes and scripts are used as conceptual tools to explore how imaginings of self and other are constructed in the travel text.

Findings: The findings identified key discourses by discerning patterns of convention in the various ways these authors frame themselves ‘in the world’ and how they position the foreign within this framework. These travellers were found to engage with place in ways that were oriented by Western viewing positions which form a rubric of discourses that positioned self, place and ‘other’. While all authors evoked values espoused in liberal democracy, these narratives are ethnocentric and reveal an element of rigidity in liberal democracy in that they cast judgement over the foreign from a position of ‘security’ and legitimate the voice through discourses of Western privilege and choice which appear as dimensions of Western internationalism as a narrow form of cosmopolitanism. Concerns are raised in relation to the rigidity of Western discourses because they impact on fostering improved intercultural relationships and, by extension, sustainable tourism practices.

Application of Results: This paper de-constructs the cosmopolitan gaze to forward a plan for revising a conceptual framework that can be used to ‘map’ culture by forwarding the idea that a cosmopolitical rubric (made up of discourses that commonly appear within cultural groups) would assist in defining the gaze from any cultural viewing position. The qualitative research method used in this study could also be applied to other forms of writings about travel and tourism to understand how other people and places are positioned to discern shifts in ways of thinking about authenticity of the foreign. This conceptual ‘tool’ could be useful to tourism planners, educators and other professionals as well as tourism media to understand how polemic positions are shaped and cultures are stigmatised through discourse. Awareness of how discourse operates in travel/tourism is crucial to understanding intercultural relationships as they impact on sustainable tourism practices.

Conclusion: These authors were found to mobilise notions of liminality and authenticity as discursive tools to provide authority to the voice, ground discourse and structure the gaze. The cosmopolitan gaze was found to be selective in its focus by drawing from widely held ‘legitimate’ Western discourse to construct ‘other’ by falling back on preconceived ideas of the foreign. The discussion raises timely and topical issues which address intercultural relationships between Western and Southwest Asian cultures in the context of tourism and travel. The paper addresses the scholarly conundrum of theorising cosmopolitanism and contributes in a useful way by forwarding a conceptual framework that can be applied to further understand the concept and the dynamics that characterise cultural exchange. In this way it contributes to tourism scholarship by focussing on issues which are immediate to questions which surround sustainable tourism.


List of Articles
No. Subject Viewssort Date
234 Think Tank V Effects of SARS Crisis on the Economic Contribution of... file 5930 Oct 13, 2013

In a context of uncertainty over traveller security, tourism experienced two major crises in 2003- the Iraq War and SARS. While the relative impacts of a complex array of impacts on travel decisionmaking are almost impossible to dissect, thi...

Author: Larry Dwyer, Peter Forsyth & Ray Spurr 

Year: 2005 

233 Think Tank XII Enhancing Social Capital through Networking for Sustai... file 5932 Nov 06, 2013

Social capital has been recognised as a factor affecting sustainable development in every discipline. A network or a partnership is identified as a “structural” form of social capital and a tool to empower participants in the networks. There...

Author: Attama Nilnoppkun 

Year: 2012 

232 Think Tank XIV Sustainable Tourism Mobility: Recommended Strategies f... file 5943 Jun 26, 2014

Transport is a vital and integral component of the tourism system yet it contributes the most emissions in tourism (Dubois, Peeters, Ceron, & Gössling, 2011; Peeters & Dubois, 2010). In line with the global concerns for sustainabilit...

Author: Diem-Trinh Le-Klähn 

Year: 2014 

231 Think Tank XVIII Community participation and stakeholder engagement in ... file 5954 Jan 07, 2019

Keywords: natural resource management, community participation, stakeholder engagement, co-creation, sustainable tourism, Networks of Reserves.

Author: Umberto Martini, Federica Buffa, Sandra Notaro, Nicola Zeni & Pier Luigi Novi Inverardi 

Year: 2018 

230 Think Tank VIII An Assessment of Efforts to Enhance the Quality of Lif... file 5969 Oct 13, 2013

Quality of life studies are usually either objective or subjective in nature. Objective quality of life studies concentrate on social indicators whereas subjective quality of life studies attempt to assess the perceived satisfaction that in...

Author: Turgut Var, Erhan Ada, Gökce Ozdemir & Deniz Hasirci 

Year: 2008 

229 Think Tank IX Sustainable Tourism Principles Reflected in Award-Winn... file 5985 Oct 13, 2013

There has been increased attention given to sustainable tourism monitoring and evaluation efforts, including corporate policies, guidelines and codes of conduct as well as certification programs (e.g., Dodds and Joppe 2005; Font and Harris ...

Author: Stuart Levy & Donald Hawkins 

Year: 2009 

228 Think Tank XV A modified value chainanalysisoftourism development in... file 5992 Jul 27, 2015

Tourism development in a relatively unknown country is faced with various challenges. The difficulty is not only choosing an appropriate tourism development strategy but also managing it in a complex sociocultural, economic and political env...

Author: Sonja Frommenwiler & Péter Varga 

Year: 2015 

OPA: Runner Up Outstanding Paper Award 

227 Think Tank XI Learning for Sustainable Tourism: Small and Medium Ent... file 6021 Oct 14, 2013

This abstract intends to present QUSS – an integrated Management System for Quality, Sustainability and Safety in theory and practice. QUSS was invented by the NGO Ecocamping and is thus basically applied on camp sites in Europe with focus ...

Author: Tatjana Thimm 

Year: 2011 

226 Think Tank V Ecolabels and Green Globe 21: Awareness and Consumer A... file 6025 Oct 13, 2013

A case in point is New Zealand, where tourism has long been recognised as an important economic force; this is aptly illustrated by the sector’s contribution of 9.6% to the country’s GDP in 2003 (TRCNZ, 2005). The resource at the heart of mu...

Author: Christian Schott 

Year: 2005 

225 Think Tank XIV Hospitality of Sustainable Tourism Encounters: Experie... file 6065 Jun 26, 2014

Global tourism is, at least to some extent, based upon to the vast inequalities between wealthy and impoverished (Cole & Morgan 2010, xv). Neglecting, or actively forgetting, the legacy of colonialism and the modern forms of economic and...

Author: Emily Höckert 

Year: 2014 

224 Think Tank XIV Residents' Support for Tourism from the Standpoint of ... file 6065 Jun 26, 2014

Therefore, being of a different nature than sustainability pillars, political sustainability (Mihalic et al., 2012) is a requirement for sustainable tourism development (Edgell, DelMastro Allen, Smith & Swanson, 2008; UNWTO, 2004). This ...

Author: Tanja Mihalič, Tina Šegota, Ljubica Knežević Cvelbar, Kir Kuščer 

Year: 2014 

223 Think Tank IV A Framework for the Development of Social and Socio-Ec... file 6072 Oct 13, 2013

This paper presents the background thinking to a CRC for Sustainable Tourism project that develops social and socio-economic indicators for tourism communities. The project emanates from the Green Globe 21 Standard that incorporates indicato...

Author: Margaret Deery, Leo Jago & Liz Fredline 

Year: 2004 

222 Think Tank V Managing of Public Risks in Tourism: Towards Sustainab... file 6110 Oct 13, 2013

How to manage risks that endanger development of tourism but that are caused by tourism itself? An industry-based model is presented as an analytic tool and adapted to the situation in tourism. It is argued that development of tourism lacks ...

Author: Yoram Krozer & Else Redzepovic 

Year: 2005 

221 Think Tank XVI The impact of CSR activities of family businesses on c... file 6165 Jul 02, 2016

Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:...

Author: Zehrer Anita 

Year: 2016 

220 Think Tank XIII Local Residents' Involvement in Rural Tourism: The Cas... file 6202 Nov 06, 2013

Community involvement is regarded as a significant factor for the development of rural tourism. In Malaysia, cooperatives are used as a catalyst to achieve community development through community involvement. This paper focuses on the involv...

Author: Uma Thevi Munikrishnan, Sushila Devi Rajaratnam, Paolo Mura & Vikneswaran Nair 

Year: 2013 

219 Think Tank XII Controlling and Influencing Visitor Flow as a Basis fo... file 6220 Nov 06, 2013

Sustainable tourism at a destination is dependent on the maintenance and good management of its attractive assets. In non-urban areas, the assets will primarily be geological, natural and/or cultural, frequently of a sensitive nature, liable...

Author: David Ward-Perkins & Frédéric Dimanche 

Year: 2012 

218 Think Tank XIV Local Networks as Sustainable Policy Instruments: A Ca... file 6221 Jun 27, 2014

In this case study, a communication network among local hotel managers was examined, first to assess the extent of communication among hotel managers, and second to identify influential members within the network. Communication with respect ...

Author: Karen Irene Thal & Tracy Burkett 

Year: 2014 

217 Think Tank V Framing Tourist Risk in UK Press Accounts of Hurricane... file 6225 Oct 13, 2013

This paper examines the coverage of Hurricane Ivan in the Caribbean published in selected leading UK newspapers in September 2004. Quantitative textual analysis have been utilised in this study to determine the main sources of information on...

Author: Marcella Daye 

Year: 2005 

216 Think Tank IX The West in the East: Conflict in the Values of Volunt... file 6302 Oct 13, 2013

Consequently, the aim of this research was to explore the complexity of trying to work within a framework of sustainability, with a given number of stakeholders (in this case, a UK organisation, its customers (volunteers, primarily British) ...

Author: Angela M. Benson 

Year: 2009 

215 Think Tank IV Evaluating Environmental Initiatives of German Hotels file 6378 Oct 13, 2013

Following a vigorous environmental protection movement trigging in Germany over thirty years ago, the German hotel industry is gradually moving in line with other sections of its society. This study attempts to present a snapshot of the asse...

Author: Joseph S. Chen, Willy Legrand, Philip Sloan & Josephine Zho 

Year: 2004 

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