Via the Regeneration and Renewal youtube channel

The Association for Tourism in Higher Education is pleased to announce its Annual Conference and Call for Papers and Call for Papers

  ATHE Annual Conference 2010 1st – 3rd Dec 2010   BACK TO THE FUTURE: RESTATING THE CASE FOR TOURISM IN HIGHER EDUCATION

http://www.athe.org.uk/conference/default.aspx  

Hosted by Canterbury Christ Church University and Canterbury Cathedral Lodge  

KEYNOTES

John Penrose (Tourism Minister) TBC

Kurt Jansen (Tourism Alliance)

Professor David Airey (University of Surrey)

Noel Josephides (Sunvil)

THEMES

Changing landscapes of the Tourism Industry

Changing landscapes of Tourism governance

Changing Landscapes of Higher Education and Tourism in Higher Education

Papers are welcomed under the following subthemes:

Horizon scanning

Importance of ethics/sustainability/globalization

The changing HE environment

Issues of employability

Corporate social responsibility

Relevance of tourism in wider society

Tourismification of society / of cities.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Full papers, presentation of works in progress and posters, which support the conference aim and within the conference themes, are invited.  Papers from other themes not listed above but reflecting the conference’s overall aim are also welcome.

ABSTRACTS

You are invited to submit an abstract of +/-200 words by 30th September 2010 using the attached abstract form, which can also be downloaded from the website: http://www.athe.org.uk/conference/

Abstracts should be submitted by e-mail to secretary@athe.org.uk and should indicate background, practical implications, methods and/or data sources, and indicative findings of the paper. All abstracts will be subject to a review process.

REGISTRATION

Registration details will be published shortly.

INFORMATION

For further information please contact Dr Marion Stuart-Hoyle, ATHE Vice-Chair/Secretary:   marion.stuart-hoyle@canterbury.ac.uk

You can read the abstract for our paper by clicking here.  The final paper is quite a development from this point and incorporates some of the material that we have been posting on here over the last year.

I’m going to use this post to apply David Harvey’s ‘seven moments’ model of the economic restructuring process that I heard him speak about here and that he has most recently outlined in an essay for the Monthly Review that you can read online here.  I have adapted these seven moments to analyse the tourism industry in this period of restructuring; it will be interesting to see whether this adds some clarity or helps us to think about how the tourism industry will emerge from the crisis.  

Some of these topics I’ve already written about, some have suggested new areas of investigation.  Over the next few months I’m going to post on each of these topics and then, eventually, bring them all together to summarise this period of restructuring in the tourism industry.

1. The organisation and technological forms involved in producing tourism products and services

It is likely that technological changes within the tourism industry will accelerate during this period of restructuring.   The effects of an increasingly competitive marketplace and problems of over-supply are combining to produce a favourable climate for innovations in the online packaging and knowledge-gathering aspects of the industry and  price-concious customers are driving an increase in competition between web sites, which seems to be providing a stimulus for big providers to move into web 2.0 provision, so as not to lose their competitive advantage.  Where the previous waves of web development have increased efficiencies for tourism businesses and helped to reduce prices for consumers, it is likely that this next wave of web 2.0-style developments will illuminate differences between providers and give new prominence to tourists as expert reviewers of tourism products.

Another aspect of tourism development that it might be interesting to focus on here will be the emergence of new destinations.  This will be driven by three factors, as we have seen in previous crises:

1. Decline within specific resorts and regions, as part of the fall-out from the economic crisis
2. The growth of new tourism markets, as the national and regional ‘winners’ of the crisis emerge
3. Socio-cultural changes that occur as a consequence of the restructuring and as a way of integrating it into pre-existing cultural frameworks.

2. The relationship to the environment

From the mid-1990s onwards, the concepts of sustainable development and eco-tourism have been central to debates about the future of tourism and have provided acres of newsprint for the broadsheets’ travel supplements as middle-class tourists have differentiated themselves from the masses by seeking our ‘responsible’, ‘ethical’, ‘sustainable’, or ‘green’ holidays.  With predicted declines in the market for organic food, ethical fashion and fairly-traded products – has this mode of tourism development also suffered and what is the future for this sector after the downturn?

3.  Social relationships within tourism

Along with the rising importance of green perspectives on tourism, ethical concerns over the social relationships brought about through tourism have been a key element of tourism discourse since the 1990s. 

This area has mainly been focused on the nature of the host-guest interaction within destinations, but has also included concerns over representation in and governance of tourism destinations, authenticity and exploitation.  As with sustainable / eco-tourism, it remains to be seen how organisations that work in this area will fare during a depression.  Recent problems at Tourism Concern are hopefully not indicative of a gradual lessening of support for ethical tourism initiatives from the public and the tourism industry.

4.  Conceptions of tourism and its values

The core question to be answered here is ‘what is tourism for?’  Historically, tourism has been seen variously as a privelege, a human right, a leisure activity, a cultural form and as a social practice.  I wrote here about contemporary developments in the relationship between tourism, social policy and regeneration.  The current crisis provides two non-exclusive conceptions of tourism within the public sphere. 

Firstly, and most likely to gain prominence quickly, is the assertion of the direct and indirect economic benefits of tourism.  In a period of a weak national currency tourism can be a key export for the UK economy and a parallel rise in domestic tourism places tourism in a position of potential growth, even if that growth is relative rather than absolute.   This potential could see tourism taking a stronger role in economic and regional development strategies, perhaps displacing retail and creative industries development in the development zeitgeist.

Secondly, it is possible that the new economics of tourism, if coupled with a sense of corporate social responsibility or development levies of some kind, could create a more favourable climate for social tourism in the UK.  In many European countries, tourism plays an important role in social policy.  Social tourism can take many forms: In France, subsidised tourism channels tourism spending to particular destinations whilst in many part of Scandanavia tourism is seen as a human right, creating obligations on the state to secure this right for its citizens.  In the UK, organisations like the Family Holiday Association have a history of providing tourism opportunities for disadvantaged groups, but this approach has never been mainstreamed into public policy. 

5.  Industrial relations within tourism

We have seen a sharpening of industrial relations within many sections of the economy over the last twelve months.  Disputes at Visteon, Vestas, Lindsey and the Royal Mail appear to be the harbingers of a new period of renewed labour militancy in the UK, but the mixture of compromises and legalistic disputes that have postponed resolution of the BA strike and the Royal Mail strikes mean that it is unclear as yet whether unions are likely to become more or less powerful through the restrucuring currently underway in response to the economic crisis.  The activities of unions in the travel and public sectors are likely to have the greatest impact on the tourism industry, but rising worker militancy generally could lead to changes in the way that non-unionised workers (the majority of tourism employees) react to threats of closures, job losses, pay cuts and work intensification, as the employees of Thomas Cook in Dublin show in the video below:

6.  Tourism policy and politics

In the UK, most public agencies are in a state of paralysis at the moment as they wait for an election and the almost inevitable period of regime change that will follow it.  The smart money seems to be on an early election in March, so until then it is going to be very difficult to get a feel for how tourism policy in the UK is going to develop.  The incoming conservative party have let it be known through various outlets that they plan a ‘bonfire of the quangos’ and no doubt this will hit our tourism agencies.  However, every incoming government since 1979 has promised exactly this and then, faced with the prospect of losing control over spending or developing truely accountable structures of governance, has tended to spend a lot of money on the restruturing and rebranding of the quangos instead.

7.  The social reproduction of tourism

Within Harvey’s model, this seventh term relates to the social reproduction of labour within capitalism and the way in which systems of production are maintained and developed through social processes.  Within this adaptation, I will develop the final category as a synthetic product of the preceding areas of analysis.  Once the 6 areas above have been considered dialectically, it will be possible to draw some initial conclusions about the ways in which the tourism industry is being maintained and developed as the crisis progresses and the strategies of restructuring become more clear. 

Each of these seven areas will provide material for blog posts throughout 2010, with a final article being produced towards the end of the year.

Smells like Teign Spirit

I’ve written about Teignmouth before on the Arcades / Promenades project blog, for those of you with an interest in finding out more about this quirky seaside town.  On the Animate Projects website you can also watch films about Bridlington and Hastings – enjoy!

Symposium
Liverpool John Moores University
1st July 2010
 
Convenors
Dr Hazel Andrews, (Tourism, Consumer and Food Studies, LJMU)
Dr Kevin Meethan, Department of Sociology, University of Plymouth
Dr Les Roberts (School of Architecture, University of Liverpool)
 
Ideas and concepts of liminality have long shaped debates around the uses and practices of space in tourism. Victor Turner’s writings on ritual and communitas, Graburn’s theory of tourism as a sacred journey, or Shield’s discussion of ‘places on the margin’ have secured a well-established foothold in the theoretical landscapes of travel and mobility. The unique qualities of liminal landscapes, as developed by these and other writers on the subject, are generally held to be those which play host to ideas of the ludic, consumption, carnivalesque, inversion or suspension of normative social and moral structures of everyday life, deterritorialisation and ‘becoming’, and so on. While these arguments and tropes remain pertinent, and their metaphorical appeal evermore attractive, the extent to which these spaces provoke counter ideas of social control, terror, surveillance, production and territorialisation, invites an urgent call to re-evaluate the meanings attached to ideas of the ‘liminal’ in tourism studies. The deaths of 21 Chinese migrant workers in Morecambe Bay in 2004 has prompted a sobering re-assessment of the coastal resort as a site of tourism, leisure and consumption. The shifting social geographies associated with these landscapes has meant that the example of the beach may equally be looked upon as a space of transnational labour, migrancy, racial tension, death, fear, uncertainty and disorientation. In this instance, the precarious and un-navigable natural landscape of Morecambe sands becomes a metonym for the increasingly de-stabilising landscapes of trans- or post-national capitalist mobility. Moreover, the settlement of asylum seekers and refugees in UK coastal resorts such as Margate has exposed the underlying tensions and social divisions between representations that play on the ludic, touristic heritage of these resorts and those which address the marginality and exclusion that characterises the other set of mobilities and meanings evoked by these spaces. In addition, the appropriation of liminal landscapes by, for example, local authorities, commercial bodies and marketeers constructs an increasingly mediated or textualised space of performance that re-fashions the embodied (and embedded) spaces as lived by those who make up their diverse social fabric.
 
We invite contributions from across a broad interdisciplinary field, including scholars and practitioners working in tourism and mobility studies, anthropology, geography, film and cultural studies. We also invite multimedia submissions on the topic of liminal landscapes.
 
For enquiries and further details contact Dr Hazel Andrews H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk.
 
Please submit proposals for papers (300 words maximum) by e-mail to H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk. We also welcome proposals for panels and exhibits.
 
Deadline for proposals:                                                 30 September 2009
Notification of acceptance:                                            November 2009
Date for Registration:                                                    March 2010
Final submission deadline for full papers:                       7 January 2010
                                                  
Papers selected from the conference proceedings will be published in Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice (www.tourismconsumption.org.).

Faculty of
Education, Community and Leisure

 
Dr Hazel Andrews PhD, MA, BSc
Senior Lecturer Tourism, Culture and Society
Centre for Tourism, Consumer and Food Studies
 

IM Marsh, Barkhill Road, Aigburth, Liverpool, L17 6BD
t: 0151 231 5234  e: H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk 
w: www.ljmu.ac.uk
Symposium
Liverpool John Moores University
1st July 2010
 
Convenors
Dr Hazel Andrews, (Tourism, Consumer and Food Studies, LJMU)
Dr Kevin Meethan, Department of Sociology, University of Plymouth
Dr Les Roberts (School of Architecture, University of Liverpool)
 
Ideas and concepts of liminality have long shaped debates around the uses and practices of space in tourism. Victor Turner’s writings on ritual and communitas, Graburn’s theory of tourism as a sacred journey, or Shield’s discussion of ‘places on the margin’ have secured a well-established foothold in the theoretical landscapes of travel and mobility. The unique qualities of liminal landscapes, as developed by these and other writers on the subject, are generally held to be those which play host to ideas of the ludic, consumption, carnivalesque, inversion or suspension of normative social and moral structures of everyday life, deterritorialisation and ‘becoming’, and so on. While these arguments and tropes remain pertinent, and their metaphorical appeal evermore attractive, the extent to which these spaces provoke counter ideas of social control, terror, surveillance, production and territorialisation, invites an urgent call to re-evaluate the meanings attached to ideas of the ‘liminal’ in tourism studies. The deaths of 21 Chinese migrant workers in Morecambe Bay in 2004 has prompted a sobering re-assessment of the coastal resort as a site of tourism, leisure and consumption. The shifting social geographies associated with these landscapes has meant that the example of the beach may equally be looked upon as a space of transnational labour, migrancy, racial tension, death, fear, uncertainty and disorientation. In this instance, the precarious and un-navigable natural landscape of Morecambe sands becomes a metonym for the increasingly de-stabilising landscapes of trans- or post-national capitalist mobility. Moreover, the settlement of asylum seekers and refugees in UK coastal resorts such as Margate has exposed the underlying tensions and social divisions between representations that play on the ludic, touristic heritage of these resorts and those which address the marginality and exclusion that characterises the other set of mobilities and meanings evoked by these spaces. In addition, the appropriation of liminal landscapes by, for example, local authorities, commercial bodies and marketeers constructs an increasingly mediated or textualised space of performance that re-fashions the embodied (and embedded) spaces as lived by those who make up their diverse social fabric.
 
We invite contributions from across a broad interdisciplinary field, including scholars and practitioners working in tourism and mobility studies, anthropology, geography, film and cultural studies. We also invite multimedia submissions on the topic of liminal landscapes.
 
For enquiries and further details contact Dr Hazel Andrews H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk.
 
Please submit proposals for papers (300 words maximum) by e-mail to H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk. We also welcome proposals for panels and exhibits.
 
Deadline for proposals:                                                 30 September 2009
Notification of acceptance:                                            November 2009
Date for Registration:                                                    March 2010
Final submission deadline for full papers:                       7 January 2010
                                                  
Papers selected from the conference proceedings will be published in Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice (www.tourismconsumption.org.).

Faculty of
Education, Community and Leisure

 
Dr Hazel Andrews PhD, MA, BSc
Senior Lecturer Tourism, Culture and Society
Centre for Tourism, Consumer and Food Studies
 

IM Marsh, Barkhill Road, Aigburth, Liverpool, L17 6BD
t: 0151 231 5234  e: H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk 
w: www.ljmu.ac.uk

Researching Coastal and Resort Destination Management: Cultures and Histories of Tourism

19^th – 20^th October 2009

Girona, Catalonia, Spain

2009 marks the hundredth anniversary of the formal designation of the Costa Brava, a title and destination region that has become synonomous with the emergence and growth of ‘mass’ tourism over the past century. The region today faces many challenges including maintaining tourist markets against competing destinations alongside environmental concerns.

This conference is therefore extremely timely in its aim of bringing together researchers who share interests in coastal and resort destination policy, planning and management in relation to culture(s) and histories of tourism.

These research areas are also clearly relevant to professionals and policy makers in destination management and the conference will provide a unique opportunity for researchers to share leading edge ideas, innovations and critical thinking with the professional destination manager participants at the European Union of Tourist Officers (EUTO) Study Visit to Catalunya which coincides with the conference. There will also be opportunities for delegates to participate in parts of the EUTO programme.

Conference Themes

The conference welcomes proposals for papers that address the development of tourism in coastal regions and resorts. Proposals might, for example address:

Creative uses of cultural, historical and heritage resources for tourism in coastal settings

Cultural events and festivals as animators of coastal resorts

Transnational approaches to and conceptions of destination policy and planning in coastal contexts

Community participation in coastal resort development

Building sustainable partnerships and stakeholder relationships between tourism, culture and heritage in coastal destinations

Competitive (dis)advantage, new tourist markets and coastal destinations

New and emerging technologies in coastal destination representation and marketing

Coastal destination image and branding

The conference organisers also welcome proposals for papers that address theoretical and applied issues and themes relating to destination management in the coastal contexts of Catalonia and the Costa Brava in particular

If you wish to submit a paper proposal, please send a 300-word abstract with full address and institutional affiliation details as an electronic file to Dr. Philip Long p.e.long@leedsmet.ac.uk

The deadline for the reception of abstracts is 31st of July 2009.

Please find regularly updated information regarding this conference, registration procedures and (at a later stage) a full programme at

http://www.udg.edu/jornades/EUTO2009/tabid/12969/Default.aspx

or email to euto2009@udg.edu

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