Arca Publishing

Little, W.

âFor the Time is at Handâ: âUn-Belizableâ Beast-Time Somethings

Espeso-Molinero, Pilar

Pastor-Alfonso, MarÃ­a JosÃ©

 
Title: In Search of Reciprocity in Indigenous Tourism Research 
Author: Pilar Espeso-Molinero & María José Pastor-Alfonso 
Affiliation: University of Alicante 
Contact: p.espeso@ua.es 
Session Type: Presentation 
 
Abstract: 
The practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit, or the social norm of 
reciprocity, is a widely accepted rule in many cultural milieus. However, research on 
Indigenous contexts has largely, and for a long time, ignored these rules, favoring practices of 
intensive data and artifact appropriation. 
Critical and decolonizing theorists are questioning the extractive nature of traditional 
research on Indigenous communities. Scholars, of Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous 
origins, are proposing new collaborative and participatory research approaches based on 
genuine respect and mutual benefit (Chambers & Buzinde, 2015; Chilisa, 2011; Tuhiwai- 
Smith, 2012). In the field of tourism studies, a growing body of literature shows examples of 
research done with the involved communities (Koster, Baccar, & Lemelin, 2012; Whitford & 
Ruhanen, 2016) rather than on them. 
With this working paper we intend to contribute to the ongoing conversation on 
decolonizing methods and approaches, presenting the ontological and epistemological 
framework that has guided our long term research in southeastern Mexico. Following an 
interuniversity agreement between the Intercultural University of Chiapas (Mexico) and the 
University of Alicante (Spain), a multidisciplinary and multiethnic team of researchers have 
been collaborating on different studies with Lacandon, Ch’ol, and Tzeltal communities engaged 
in the business of tourism. Throughout the process, many agreements have been reached, 
projects developed, and interactions established between external and internal co-researchers. 
In this paper, we will critically reflect on the reciprocities negotiated with these Maya 
communities and their entrepreneurs, giving particular attention to the issues of reflexivity, the 
co-research process, and the reporting back of findings to their rightful owners. 
 
References: 
Chambers, D., & Buzinde, C.N. (2015). Tourism and decolonisation: Locating research  
and self. Annals of Tourism Research, 51, 1–16. 
Chilisa, B. (2011). Indigenous research methodologies. Thousand Oaks: SAGE  
Publications. 
Koster, R., Baccar, K., & Lemelin, R.H. (2012). Moving from research ON, to research  
with and for indigenous communities: A critical reflection on community-based 
participatory research. Canadian Geographer, 56(2), 195–210. 
Tuhiwai-Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples, 2nd 
edition. London: Zed Books. 
Whitford, M.M., & Ruhanen, L. (2016). Indigenous tourism research, past and present: 
Where to from here? Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 24(8–9), 1080–1099.


English

In Search of Reciprocity in Indigenous Tourism Research

de Jong, Anna

 
Title: Foraging Tourism: Critical Moments in Sustainable Consumption 
Author: Anne de Jong 
Affiliation: University of the Highlands and Islands 
Contact: anna.dejong.whc@uhi.ac.uk 
Session Type: Presentation 
 
Abstract: 
Despite the prevalence of sustainability discourses across the Global North, for the 
majority of people, abstract issues of sustainability often have a low salience for the realities of 
travel choices. Sustainable tourism researchers recognise that any shifts resulting in sustainable 
tourist practice are likely to come about as a result of shifts in everyday, highly routinized social 
practices, relations, and socio-technical structures. This paper examines relations between social 
practice, sustainability, and tourism through the rise of foraging tourism across the UK, US, and 
Antipodes. Using evidence from qualitative interviews and media analysis detailing perspectives 
of professional foragers and attendees, alongside observant participation on foraging courses, the 
paper records the personal political motivations prompting the accrual of foraging courses. By 
engaging with debates surrounding the meanings of sustainable tourism, the paper extends 
understanding of these concepts through the identification of foraging tourism as a facilitator of 
sustainable practice and discourse, identifying the ways through which tourism informs and is 
informed by everyday practice. 
 
 
 
 
 
  


Foraging Tourism: Critical Moments in Sustainable Consumption

Bell, Claudia

 
Title: Retirement, Risk, and Rescue: Western Retirees as Permanent Tourists in S E Asia 
Author: Claudia Bell 
Affiliation: University of Auckland 
Contact: c.bell@auckland.ac.nz 
Session Type: Presentation 
 
Abstract: 
As the global population ages, for many older people, tourism has transmuted into 
International Retirement Migration (IRM). With projections of over 714 million people aged 65 
or older by the year 2020, how, and where, will they live? This quandary is particular to this era 
of history. For many of this age group, moving from a First World to a Third World country has 
become a practicable and desirable economic preference. These people become permanent 
tourists. They are not expats re-establishing for careers, with fellow nationals or other working 
expats as networks; daily social contacts are casual encounters with other mature-age tourists 
also enjoying free time and leisure. This project illustrates the fluidity of definitions of ‘tourists.’ 
But for this group, what are the risks? 
My recent research investigated western retirees as settlers, or as permanent itinerants, in 
Southeast Asia. A dominant theme underpinning their stories was about their decisions to leave 
their home countries and try a new life. In either case—staying at home, or venturing 
elsewhere—they were faced with potential and actual risks.  
In interviews with these retirees, risks were usually posed as ‘I was getting so anxious 
about….’ (money, health, family etc); ‘I had had enough’ (of their way of life in the old 
location); or ‘considerations’ (in making the big decision), or ‘what if something goes wrong?’ 
(in the new location).  
The risks of remaining at home included accounts of wearisome boredom, an inevitable 
weekly lifestyle, a sense of social isolation (‘no-one cares about old people’), and growing 
financial disadvantage. Becoming a permanent tourist somewhere else might provide rescue 
from those circumstances. These concerns were balanced against the attractions of staying home: 
not having to cope with travel logistics, easy reliance on friends and neighbours for everyday 
company, and the relative ease of familiar daily routines (though boring).  
Risks in the new locations were genuinely dramatic and drew from recent actual events: 
terrorist attacks and tsunamis, for example. More prosaic risks were fear of potential loneliness, 
of figuring out border visas and local currencies, of having sufficient money to be reasonably 
comfortable, and of dealing with potential ill-health in a foreign environment.  
Some chose their new location though colonial links with their own nation: British people 
retiring to Malaysia, for example. Whilst British colonisation of Malaysia ended in 1946, that 
legacy still drove ‘migratory imaginings’ and beliefs in entitlement to exercise continuity with 
the colonial past. This sense of entitlement to some (unspecified) privileges might reduce 
potential risk. They could flit between Georgetown, Malacca, Langkawi, and the Cameron 
Highlands as whim and bus timetables dictated.  
Even for those without direct colonial links, for example Australian retirees in Cambodia, 
these new arrivals knew they could benefit from the power and fiscal inequality between their 
home country and the one being visited. Their status as westerners (visible through their white 
skin), and wealth relative to local people, meant they assumed advantage. But they were also 
aware that they could be helpless in the face of any major catastrophe, or even a minor mishap. 
This was inherent to perceptions of risk.   


Retirement, Risk, and Rescue: Western Retirees as Permanent Tourists in S E Asia

Adinolfi, Maisa

Ivanovic, Milena

 
Title: The Story of My Life? Uncovering Transmodern in Experiences of Tourists Staying in 
Soweto 
Author: Maisa C. Adinolfi & Milena Ivanovic 
Affiliation: University of Johannesburg  
Contact: mcorreia@uj.ac.za 
Session Type: Presentation 
 
Abstract: 
Transmodernism (Ateljevic, 2009; Gelter, 2010) represents the new value system towards 
an integration into an environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable world (Pritchard, 
Morgan & Ateljevic, 2011), as well as a new economic order embedded in a mature phase of the 
post-capitalist experiential economy, the authentic economy (Gilmore & Pine, 2007). This new 
economy denotes a paradigm shift in production and consumption of the economic value from 
staging the consumers’ experiences to rendering authenticity which results in personal 
transformation. Pine and Gilmore’s (1999:166) proposition that transformation value should be 
added as a fifth economic offering, in addition to commodities, goods, services, and experiences, 
confirms the repositioning of the post-capitalist economic values to the requirements of a new 
emerging transmodern world order. Gilmore and Pine (2007) ascertain that transformation value 
is the ultimate economic value rendered through authentic qualities of the products which lead to 
personal transformation positioned as the highest order (above self-actualisation) on Maslow’s 
hierarchy (Gelter, 2010). Therefore, the new economic proposition is not about delivering a 
service or staging ‘authentic’ experiences but rather about guiding a consumer (tourist) towards 
personal, individualised transformation beyond self-actualisation (Gelter, 2010) where the tourist 
becomes a product and a co-creator in the process of the production of authentic meanings. As 
the transformation value is preconditioned by the provision of authentic offerings as part of new 
authentic tourism, it is suggested that only an immersive, ‘live as a local’ type of authentic tourist 
stay can lead to experience co-creation resulting in personal transformation.  
Soweto, a famous township and a must-see tourist destination on the outskirts of 
Johannesburg, is regarded as a dangerous and unsafe place, which is why it is predominantly 
visited as part of organised half-day tours. The aim of this paper is to profile tourists choosing to 
stay in Soweto and to ascertain how many of those are in fact the new breed of authentic tourists 
searching for personal transformation. More specifically, this paper is set to uncover 
characteristics of such tourists, what motivates them to do that, and to what extent they co-create 
their experiences with locals. In particular, this paper is set to establish to what extent tourists 
staying in Soweto engage in immersive co-creative activities and which of these authentic 
activities, if any, lead to a transformatory experience.  
Methodologically, this is an exploratory, qualitative study based on 30 semi-structured 
interviews with tourists staying in Soweto. The data were collected over a period of 6 months, 
from December 2016 to the end of May 2017. A content analysis of transcribed interviews and 
demographic profiles of respondents are summarised and discussed in the context of the main 
findings. The study represents a contribution to scarce academic literature on authentic economy 
and the transformatory tourist experience. Additionally it offers a deeper understanding of the 
mechanisms of how immersive experiences are created and which of these experiences/activities 
actually lead to personal transformations.  


The Story of My Life? Uncovering Transmodern in Experiences of Tourists Staying in Soweto

CTS 7: Discussants

Wong, Cora Un In

Being a Monk for a Day. Really ? The Case of Pu-Tuo-Shan

Richards, Victoria

âOh, Look, Thereâs That Blind Woman. Whatâs She Doing Taking Photographs?â Performing Tourism through Vision Impaired Bodies

Ren, Carina

 
 
Title: Telling and Thinking with Tourism: Matters of Care in Research 
Author: Carina Ren  
Affiliation: Aalborg University Copenhagen 
Contact: ren@cgs.aau.dk 
Session Type: Presentation 
 
Abstract:  
This presentation wishes to discuss the politics and practices of knowledge of tourism 
research through the notion of ‘matter of care’ by Puig de la Bellacasa (2011, 2012). Recently, 
this constructivist, feminist thinker in science and technology studies has deployed the notion in 
a plea for a speculative commitment to neglected things, to the labor of care—often dismissed as 
too mundane, too unimportant, too out of place—and to how things could be different. As a 
relational and non-moralistic approach, the notion of matters of care differs from the hegemonic 
ethics colonized in corporate and political discourses. Neither is care “an accusatory moral 
stance—if only you would care!—nor can its knowledge politics become a moralism in 
epistemological guise—show that you care and your knowledge would be better” (Puig de la 
Bellacasa, 2011, p. 95). Care is understood as “everything that we do to maintain, continue and 
repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, 
ourselves, and our environment, all that we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web” 
(Tronto, 1993, quoted in Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, p. 93). As a relational endeavour, it does not 
(only) offer ‘solutions’ or critique, but proceeds through research efforts which “are ongoing, 
adaptive, tinkering and open ended” (Heuts & Mol, 2013). 
Inspired by this move, this paper explores how tending to tourism with care can add 
further to how we tell tourism and how we think with tourism. For tourism researchers, tending 
to tourism concerns with care entails firstly an understanding of tourism not as a well-defined 
activity but entangled with a multitude of other practices. Second, it adds an intention not only to 
represent or tell tourism in a responsible way, but also to engage with its (possible) becoming, to 
engage in ontological politics (Mol, 2001). Lastly, studying carefully entails that the one who 
studies is implicated in this becoming. In terms of knowledge politics, how we study and 
represent tourism things and agencies, how we tell and think with tourism, has ‘worldmaking 
effects’. 
 
References: 
Heuts, F., & Mol, A. (2013). What is a good tomato? A case of valuing in practice. Valuation  
Studies, 1(2), 125–146. 
Mol, A. (1999). Ontological politics: A word and some questions. The Sociological Review,  
47(S1), 74–89. 
de la Bellacasa, M.P. (2011). Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things.  
Social Studies of Science, 41(1), 85–106. 
de la Bellacasa, M.P. (2012). ‘Nothing comes without its world’: Thinking with care. The  
Sociological Review, 60(2), 197–216. 
Tronto, J.C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Psychology  
Press. 
 
  


Telling and Thinking with Tourism: Matters of Care in Research

Lapointe, Dominic

Sarrasin, Bruno

Guimont, David

Lebon, Coralie

Guillemard, Alexis

 
 
Title: From Production of Space to Citizen Innovation: Looking at Climate Change and Tourism 
Development from a Critical Perspective (and within a Business School) 
Author: Dominic Lapointe1, Bruno Sarrasin1, David Guimont2, Coralie Lebon1, & Alexis 
Guillemard1  
Affiliation: Université du Québec à Montréal1; Cégep de Rivière-Du-Loup/Living Lab en 
Innovation Ouverte2 
Contact: lapointe.dominic@uqam.ca 
Session Type: Presentation 
 
Abstract: 
The tourism industry is vulnerable to climate change because many of its resources will 
be strongly affected by it (Jones & Phillips, 2011). Coastal destinations are likely to be the most 
affected, with rising sea levels and extreme weather events. All these changes compel coastal 
destinations to adapt. Adaptation is a challenge, but also a priority, for this industry is critical to 
many communities. Adaptation is a complex issue, full of wicked problems, and builds through 
representations of space, place, environment, climate, and tourism. All those representations are 
the product of history, dense social interactions, power relationships, political arrangements, and 
individual stakeholder life stories. And not to forget, for many coastal tourism communities, the 
clock is ticking because sea level is rising and extreme weather events are becoming more and 
more regular. This is the case of the St-Lawrence estuary in Quebec, Canada, which is where our 
researchers’ gazes have been set upon during the last three years. 
With space being the first resource of tourism, we looked at tourism adaptation through 
the lens of the production of space to identify first the institutional discourses through the form 
of governmental strategies and how they reproduce the tourism space of the St-Lawrence 
(Lapointe, Sarrasin, & Guillemard, 2015). We notice discrepancies between the discourses of 
tourism and climate change, even if the main stakeholder in producing those discourses is the 
Government du Québec. Then, we looked at how, locally, other discourses interact with those 
institutional discourses to finely reproduce space through local tourism practices (Lapointe, 
Lebon, & Guillemard, 2016). The importance of land value as a structuring force under the 
tourism and environmental discourses was blatant; the adaptation spatial dynamics were 
contingent on whether the land was public or private. However, it left a blank spot about what 
this type of spatial dynamics holds for the future for these communities, therefore calling for 
another analytical lens. That’s where we turn to resilience theory, to observe how the action-
reaction of adaptation, to the rhythm of extreme weather events, structured the answer.  
We end up looking at strong tendencies to engineered resilience to return as fast as 
possible to a state close to the previous perceived steady state. Stakeholders, especially private 
land owners, target short-term reactive actions that secure fast the value of their property at the 
detriment of long-term actions, which seem riskier on the short term (Lapointe & Sarrasin, in 
press). 
Our previous research identified that adaptation of local communities would be 
influenced by spatial dynamics in transformation. These new dynamics emphasize the social and 
collective dimension of adaptation to climate change and would make it dependent on the social 
innovations of the stakeholders (Rodima-Taylor et al., 2012). However, current research on 
adaptation to climate change of the tourism industry has paid little attention to the social 
dimensions of adaptation and its non-climatic factors. The issue of innovation in adaptation to 
climate change has mainly focused on the administrative and technological aspects (Rodima- 
 
 
Taylor et al., 2012), leaving aside the issue of adaptation as a social innovation. Nevertheless, the 
low propensity of tourism enterprises to cooperate to innovate and the emphasis on partnership to 
foster social innovation in adaptation to climate change (Rodima-Taylor et al., 2012) highlight 
the importance of finding an effective and efficient intermediary to improve cooperation, 
stimulate innovation, and involve citizens within a social citizen innovation process. There is a 
role for a Living Lab (LL) to play (Guimont & Lapointe, 2016). Therefore, opening up the field 
for action research to try to answer the following is important: (1) How can the LL remove the 
barriers to innovation for a coastal destination in the process of adaptation to climate change? (2) 
How do the participants’ social representations of climate change evolve within an LL approach? 
(3) What forms of territorial organization/mobilization emerge from the LL approach to meet the 
climate change adaptation needs of the local tourism industry? 
This presentation aimed at bridging theoretically three years of research on climate 
change adaptation; the research path described before is a back and forth discussion from the 
theoretical critical thinking and empirical events on the field. Critically thinking of how climate 
change adaptation is framed by discourses and how it is lived by social agents brought us to 
engage in action research to break from the adaptation triad: do nothing, hold the line, move 
away. It will also be a reflexion of how the institutional context in which the researchers are 
involved interacts with the actual research we do. 
 
References: 
Guimont, D., & Lapointe, D. (2016). Empowering local tourism providers to innovate through  
a Living Lab process: Does scale matter? Technology Innovation Management Review, 
6(11), 18–25. 
Jones, A., & Phillips, M. (2011). Introduction—Disappearing destinations: Current issues,  
Challenges, and polemics. In A. Jones & M. Phillips, eds., Disappearing Destinations: 
Climate Change and Future Challenges for Coastal Tourism (pp. 1–9). Wallingsford, 
UK: CABI International. 
Lapointe, D., Lebon, C., & Guillemard, A. (2016). Coastal tourism space in the context of 
climate change: Discourses and strategies. Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes, 
8(5). 
Lapointe, D., & Sarrasin, B. (In press). (Re)production of resilient tourism space in context of  
climate change : A case study from Québec, Canada. In A. Lew & J. Cheer, eds., Tourism 
Resilience and Adaptation to Environmental Change. Routledge. 
Lapointe, D., Sarrasin, B., & Guillemard, A. (2015). Changements climatiques et mise en  
tourisme du St-Laurent au Québec: Analyse critique des représentations. VertigO, Hors-
série 23, Novembre. 
Rodima-Taylor, D., et al. (2012). Adaptation as innovation, innovation as adaptation: An  
institutional approach to climate change. Applied Geography, 33, 107–111. 
 
 
  


From Production of Space to Citizen Innovation: Looking at Climate Change and Tourism Development from a Critical Perspective (and within a Business School)

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