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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 Views Datesort
294 Think Tank IX Valuing Open Innovation Environments in Tourism Educat... file 6252 Oct 13, 2013

The world has changed tremendously since the publication of Our Common Future by the World Commission for Environment and Development (1987), which elevated the concept of sustainable development from grassroots initiatives to the forefront...

Author: Janne Liburd & Anne-Mette Hjalager 

Year: 2009 

293 Think Tank IX Sustainable Tourism Principles Reflected in Award-Winn... file 4520 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 

292 Think Tank IX Sustainable Tourism Development Plan for the Old City ... file 8933 Oct 13, 2013

This research aims to propose a sustainable tourism development plan for the City of Nan. Since the year 2000, Nan civil society leaders, national and international stakeholders have tried to develop Nan into a world heritage destination. I...

Author: Donruetai Kovathanakul 

Year: 2009 

291 Think Tank IX Exploring Tourists’ Environmental Learning, Values, an... file 5614 Oct 13, 2013

There is a need for a research agenda, which achieves a holistic understanding of the nature and influences of environmental learning on tourists’ environmental values and travel experiences in relation to climate change. Why, because touri...

Author: Ulrike Kachel & Gayle Jennings 

Year: 2009 

» Think Tank IX De-constructing the Cosmopolitan Gaze file 3382 Oct 13, 2013

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 interdisci...

Author: Patricia Johnson 

Year: 2009 

289 Think Tank IX Developing a knowledge platform on value of parks for ... file 3354 Oct 13, 2013

National Parks and other protected natural areas are a significant point of focus for tourism activity globally. Consequently it is important to understand the values of parks for tourism to assist with effective policy, planning and manage...

Author: Michael Hughes & Jack Carlsen 

Year: 2009 

288 Think Tank IX Do Chinese tourists find their in-group members more t... file 2435 Oct 13, 2013

Furthermore, social identity theory suggests that people are attracted to others who are familiar to themselves because their similarity reinforces their self-image (Tajfel, 1982), and that people from collectivist culture tend to favour in-...

Author: Rui Jin Hoare, Ken Butcher & Danny O'Brien 

Year: 2009 

287 Think Tank IX The elusiveness of sustainability in tourism: The cult... file 6526 Oct 13, 2013

Sustainable tourism is perhaps the most prominent feature of contemporary tourism discourse. However, despite its prominence for several decades, achieving sustainability remains as elusive as ever. This paper explores the concept of the cu...

Author: Freya Higgins-Desbiolles 

Year: 2009 

286 Think Tank IX The role of values in sustaining the hospitality labou... file 6977 Oct 13, 2013

The role of human resources in sustaining hospitality enterprises has long been recognized (Hjalager und Andersen 2001; Baum 2007). Personnel are considered vital for the delivery of touristic experiences, thus being a central ingredient of ...

Author: Anja Hergesell, Ulrike Bauernfeind & Dagmar Lund-Durlacher 

Year: 2009 

285 Think Tank IX Valuing water: Perceived differences in attitude and u... file 5264 Oct 13, 2013

The recent explosion of second home development in tourism areas around the world is a reflection not only of the increased mobility of capital and people associated with the effects of globalization but also the development models employed ...

Author: Alison M. Gill, Peter W. Williams & Shelagh Thompson 

Year: 2009 

284 Think Tank IX Tourism Price Competitiveness: a neglected ‘value’ in ... file 3855 Oct 13, 2013

Price competitiveness is one of the most important factors in the overall tourism competitiveness of a country or a destination. There is widely accepted evidence that prices are one of the most important factors in decisions about whether, ...

Author: Larry Dwyer & Peter Forsyth 

Year: 2009 

283 Think Tank IX Values: Dollars, trees or feelings? file 2920 Oct 13, 2013

The importance of values to tourism is but one aspect of the importance of values in human interactions with the natural environment and even more broadly to the human condition. However, attempts to understand the impact of values on behav...

Author: Denise Dillon 

Year: 2009 

282 Think Tank IX Using Social and Political Values to Assess Host Commu... file 4272 Oct 13, 2013

Tourism, like any other endeavour, operates within the social and political domains of a community, and it is therefore likely that residents with different social and political values would hold different representations of tourism. In the ...

Author: Margaret Deery, Leo Jago & Liz Fredline 

Year: 2009 

281 Think Tank IX Labour Justice and Sustainable Tourism: The Centrality... file 7299 Oct 13, 2013

What we value is intricately linked to our morality and our ethics, whether personal or corporate. Sustainability is essentially a statement of morality, embedding as it does the notion of inter- and intra-generational equity. This includes,...

Author: Stephanie Chok & Jim Macbeth 

Year: 2009 

280 Think Tank IX Revitalizing Community Values through Railway Regenera... file 8737 Oct 13, 2013

This paper presents a tourism research and education approach for the optimization of social capital invested in community action in support of railway tourism in the Asia Pacific region. The main hypothesis of the research is that railway r...

Author: Ian Chaplin 

Year: 2009 

279 Think Tank IX How to create superior value in sustainable tourism: ... file 7663 Oct 13, 2013

Extensive research and practical implementation concerning the value of natural resources has thus far been conducted when one considers for example wildlife-, eco- and cultural tourism, however many of these values originate from industry ...

Author: Philipp E. Boksberger & Jack Carlsen 

Year: 2009 

278 Think Tank IX The West in the East: Conflict in the Values of Volunt... file 4689 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 

277 Think Tank IX What do sustainable tourism researchers value? An anal... file 7928 Oct 13, 2013

Sustainable Tourism has emerged as a major field of specialisation within tourism and has been so pervasive that some have suggested that the field represents a fifth platform of tourism research, while others have argued that the field has...

Author: Pierre Benckendorff 

Year: 2009 

276 Think Tank X Cultural-Touristic Network Altenkirchen – Perspective ... file 7864 Oct 13, 2013

Altenkirchen is situated in Westerwald/Raiffeisen region of Germany (between the cities of Bonn, Cologne, Mainz and Wiesbaden) and in addition to the 7,000 city inhabitants includes 42 municipalities with a further 24,000 people. It is a ci...

Author: Sanja Zerlauth & Dietmar Wiegand 

Year: 2010 

275 Think Tank X How Is Sustainability ‘Materialised’ in Tourism? Conte... file 1935 Oct 13, 2013

Meaning is one of the most elusive and ubiquitous properties of tourism spaces. This paper analyses the ambiguity of meaning in the materiality of tourism sustainability. Sustainable development and its three interrelated principles of holi...

Author: Neil M. Walsh 

Year: 2010 

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