2. Looking for book chapters.

 

 

From: Kevin Meethan [ K.Meethan@plymouth.ac.uk

 ]

Sent: woensdag 17 november 2004 15:36

To: Kloeze, Jan Te

Subject: Looking for book chapters

 

Dear Jan:

I hope you are keeping well. I am writing to ask for your help, in particular if you could put out a call on the ISA mailing list for me as follows, it would very much be appreciated. On another related matter, perhaps we could also discuss future plans to publish ISA papers in the Ashgate New Directions in Tourism Analysis series.

 

Regards

 

Kevin

 

 

 

 

Dear all:

 

I am currently editing a book for CABI called Tourism, Consumption and Representation: Narratives of place and self.

 

Due to a number of reasons, several contributors have withdrawn, but the publishers are still willing to go ahead, provided I can find two contributions that deal with Australia/New Zealand, and two that deal with the Americas , ideally the USA/Canada. The time line is rather tight, (submissions by early February 2005) but if anyone has material that they wish to see published, and fits within the broad remit outlined below, then please get in touch with me at the following email address:

 

K.Meethan@plymouth.ac.uk

 

Dr Kevin Meethan

 

Principal Lecturer in Sociology,

 

Academic Director, Social Research and Regeneration Unit.

 

 

 

Tourism, Consumption and Representation: Narratives of place and self.

 

Tourism research is continuing to develop, in particular away from early    business and geographical models towards approaches more informed by other social sciences. Although tourism involves spatial and cultural mobility, it is also irreducibly associated with the specificity of places, with the processes by which tourist sights are demarcated and set apart from the mundane. The processes involved can be viewed as a form of commodification, tourists not only travel to consume, but what they consume is in many respects the destination itself.

 

In turn, the production of tourist space is often the creation of tourism professionals, which present official and sanctioned narratives of place and culture. In this sense it is possible to view such production as the ‘encoding’ of dominant value systems, the production of the ‘tourist gaze’. There are a number of problems with such approaches. First is the assumption that representations in and of themselves are a form of power and dominance, which has lead to a focus on the production of tourist spaces. In turn, this relates to the second problem, that of conflating production with consumption, in assuming that the narratives are simply passively accepted and ‘read’ by consumers. Although this may occur in certain circumstances, more recent theoretical and empirical work has called into doubt such assumptions.  Studies on the nature of biography and life histories for example, draw attention to the fact that structure of personal narratives does not necessarily mirror other forms of literary discourse or public narratives. Similarly, the recent literature on consumption draws attention to its dynamic nature, and the ways in which consumption can be considered as a form of reflexive practice through which narratives of the self are actively constituted.

 

For this reason the dynamic interaction between production and consumption, between the public commodification of the tourist gaze and the personalised worlds of consumption needs to be the subject of serious enquiry. The contributions to this book will examine this interplay between the production and consumption of tourist spaces, placing an emphasis on the practices of public/private narrative, the tensions and overlap between them, and their relation to the formation of self-identity. Individually they will also address a number of relevant sub-themes which mediated the practices of consumption such as age, gender, religion, and sexual orientation, as much as the values that the producers of tourist space seek to evoke.