Coastal blue space and wellbeing research: looking beyond western tides

ABSTRACT

In this paper we focus on coastal blue spaces and the ways in which they have been advocated as beneficial for health and wellbeing in the context of leisure practices. We offer a reassessment of some of the claims made in this growing body of literature, highlighting the diverse cultural practices at the coast across different geographical contexts, particularly for those communities that have experienced exclusion due to ethnicity, culture, and income. We then discuss conceptions of coastal blue space and wellbeing within the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, a bi-cultural nation in which indigenous knowledges connected to both wellbeing and leisure in the outdoor world are impacting dominant (white, colonial) discourses, policies and practices. We illustrate that a Māori world view embraces different practices and assumptions about what water means and how relationships with water are made including through leisure practices. Aotearoa New Zealand provides a revealing cultural context for re-assessing and indeed challenging Eurocentric assumptions about blue spaces as sites of wellbeing. More widely we suggest that it is timely to anchor blue space and wellbeing research to different ‘worlds’; that looking in to reach out and expanding research agendas is a useful and important enterprise.     

Are there cultural limits to tourism?

This article poses the question: are there cultural limits to tourism? It argues that tourism is a culture industry in the sense that it markets cultural products to tourists as cultural experiences. The three elements of tourism as culture are: the cultural foundations of tourism products, the sophistication of tourists’ perceptions and experiences of tourist cultures, and the cultural consequences of tourism development on resident communities. Yet these aspects are usually treated in a tokenistic way in favour of economic and environmental considerations, ignoring the cultural consequences of major changes to destination communities as a result of tourist development. This article proposes that the changes and consequences of tourism on the culture of destinations and on the culture of tourists should be central to debates about sustainable tourism development. The article proposes a number of conditions or indicators to identify the matrix of impacts of tourism from which acceptable and unacceptable limits can be determined. The use of these indicators should be central to planning, management and monitoring practices to achieve sustainable tourism.     

Leisure pursuits: uncovering the ‘selective tradition’ in culture and well-being evidence for policy

ABSTRACT

This article reconsiders the value of leisure studies to well-being evidence for policy-making. It presents secondary analyses of Office for National Statistics data from the Measuring National Well-being (MNW) debate (2010). It finds that leisure is more important to the nation than accounted for in official reports. Using Raymond Williams’ framework of ‘lived culture’ and ‘recorded culture’, the article interprets this analytical discrepancy as demonstrating the culture of ‘selective tradition’.

Raymond Williams’ work is used to understand the sidelining of leisure in the MNW programme in two ways. Firstly, the article addresses survey design and analysis. It finds a methodological bias against free text data as evidence, affecting which aspects of cultural and social life appear central to well-being. Secondly, the article takes a discourse approach to cultural sector advocacy, which, in arguing the value of arts-related activity, relegates aspects of ‘culture as ordinary’ by default. These two selective traditions mean that ‘everyday participation’ is not valued in discussions of well-being evidence, advocacy or in the final MNW measures, despite its value to the public. This article prioritises everyday understandings of well-being over those of experts, offering an ethical and practical contribution to leisure studies and policy-making for well-being.     

‘Doing mindful colouring’: just a leisure activity or something more?

ABSTRACT

Adult colouring books have become vastly popular in recent years, and have been successfully rebranded as a therapeutic tool for improving health and wellbeing. The aim of this study was to construct an authentic insider representation of the women’s lived experiences of ‘doing colouring’. This study adopted a qualitative interview strategy and reported on the narratives of 15 women’s experiences of mindfulness colouring books. Doing colouring can achieve a distinctive form of mindfulness with therapeutic qualities. This process increased the capacity for concentration, awareness and regulation for the enhancement of spirituality and self-care practice. Spiritual meanings were attached to doing colouring, specifically spirituality as connectedness to oneself with perceived inner peace and calmness derived from the mindful meditative experience. Doing mindful colouring was identified as ‘taking time’ to practice self-reflection, self-awareness and self-care to promote physical, emotional and social wellbeing. The meanings and practices of mindfulness were examined to provide an explanatory framework for understanding doing colouring to achieve health benefits. This research contributes to the emerging literature on mindfulness colouring books, thus advancing our understanding of the diverse benefits contributing to the practitioners’ sense of wellbeing.     

Learning to leisure: femininity and practices of the body

Within this paper, I conceptualise practices of the body that are learnt and deployed as part of feminised body work within the cultural context of girls’ leisure. These are practices of the body that are engaged by young women in ways that allow them to (re)construct their subjectivities as well as ‘negotiate a physical sense of themselves’. Therefore, this paper begins by mapping the theoretical foundations upon which the analysis of femininity is couched. Predicated upon debates that distinguish between the girl as a passive, duped recipient of culture’s pedagogical signs and the girl as an active, autonomous ‘freely choosing’, ‘freely consuming’ citizen, I draw out the ways in which young girls’ body practices can shed light on the complex relationship between ‘choice’, agency, consumption and subjectivity. Drawing on data collected from workshops and focus groups, I locate consumption, body management and beautification as constituents and simultaneously constitutors of leisure time. I thus offer insight into the ways in which a group of twenty 13-year-old girls who attended a private (fee paying) school in the West of England account for, maintain, develop, and in places resist, localised appearance cultures. Structured around certain leisure activities – reading magazines, shopping for clothes, eating, engaging in physical activity, applying beauty products, make-up and hair styling – this paper concludes by highlighting the ways in which wider cultural discourses are having embodied effects and are being consumed, not without consequence, as commonplace everyday preoccupations.     

Creating Distance from Body Issues: Exploring New Materialist Feminist Possibilities for Renegotiating Gendered Embodiment

Abstract

The body’s active role in the production of gendered embodiments is a key focus for feminist cultural studies and leisure studies. The article draws on new materialist feminist scholarship to explore how gender relations are produced and negotiated in physical culture through one case study example taken from a wider study of young people’s experiences of the body and self-image over time. The article explores how gendered embodiment is assembled through the socio-material circumstances of everyday life. For one particiapnt, 'Ann', “creating distance” from appearance concerns was an embodied process which involved new practices and encounters (e.g., walking for leisure, reading feminist literature) and relationships and engagements with others (e.g., a partner, friends, family). The potential for feminism to open possibilities to imagine the body otherwise is also discussed in relation to recent efforts to foster social justice imperatives in leisure sciences and feminist physical cultural studies.     

Cultural sustainability and fluidity in Bhutan's traditional festivals

Abstract

This paper engages the “culture gap” in the sustainable tourism literature by addressing issues of cultural sustainability through an investigation of traditional festivals in Bhutan. Cultural sightseeing is the major motivation for tourism to Bhutan, and religious festivals are among the primary contexts within which local people and tourists interact. Tourism brings forces of modernization and globalization into contact with traditional practices, with various consequences. Based primarily on on-site observation of religious festivals, and interviews with Bhutanese monks and abbots, this paper explores the incursion of modernization into traditional festivals. Bauman's concept of "liquid modernity" is applied to articulate the intertwining of traditional and modern practices and frames of reference in constantly changing ways. This leads to a critical discussion of how the case of Bhutan’s festivals reveals the necessity of seeing cultural sustainability in fluid and evolutionary terms, especially in our “liquid modern” times. Foreign tourists and local youth are identified as particular agents of liquid modernism in the religious festivals, bringing perspectives and behaviors that diverge from those of the traditional society within which the meaning and practices of these festivals are rooted, which in turn affects the performance and performers of the dances.     

Shattered but smiling: Human resource management and the wellbeing of hotel employees during COVID-19

The purpose of this paper is to explore the human resource management (HRM) practices adopted by hotels during COVID-19 and to examine the impact of COVID-19 on the wellbeing of hotel employees using qualitative thematic analysis. This study presents HRM practices that organizations can use to effectively manage employees in uncertain times. There is compelling evidence that employee-centered HRM practices strongly impact employee wellbeing. This paper integrates the insights from an HRM framework for wellbeing using a job demands-resources model. The paper identifies themes that confirm and extend existing theories and models of wellbeing. The findings are important for policy makers by offering guidance for managing people effectively during tough times.     

Sustainable travel writing? Exploring the ethical dilemmas of twenty-first-century travel writers

There is a paucity of academic literature on travel writing that examines travel writers and their perceived influence on sustainability. This article addresses this lacuna by exploring how travel writers understand their responsibilities and reflects on ethics in their profession, particularly in how foreign destinations and cultures are portrayed. This is significant because some travel writers have been accused of contributing to what interviewees called the “Lonely Planet Syndrome”, the notion that writing about a place will introduce and encourage mass tourism, changing the original state of the place for the worse. In this qualitative, phenomenological study, data were collected from 23 in-depth interviews with twenty-first-century travel writers and analysed using an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. Findings suggest that while some interviewees expressed anxiety about their perceived accountability to mediate foreign cultures responsibly, others embraced their role as a cultural mediator. They cared about local cultures and wanted to write in responsible ways by supporting more sustainable outcomes, reflected in the themes of cross-cultural understanding, socio-cultural and environmental advocacy and promoting benefits of tourism to communities. Future studies could include exploring the role of travel editors, travel writers’ professional knowledge and the growing role of travel blogs.     

Monster mines,dugouts, and abandoned villages: a composite narrative of Burra’s heritage

In a bid to join recent efforts to develop innovative approaches to heritage, this article argues that adopting a collaborative mode of inquiry is a useful way of coming to terms with the plurality of ways heritage landscapes are enlivened by their visitors. It also points to some of the advantages of incorporating researchers’ personal experiences into academic research. With a focus on the Burra Heritage Trail in South Australia (geared around the Burra Heritage Passport), the article brings together four sets of research experiences, each informed by different (though cognisant) disciplinary backgrounds: art history, anthropology, heritage studies, and tourism planning. The result is a form of experimental autoethnographic writing in which four voices reflect upon their embodied, sensuous, and mobile experiences as ‘tourist’ moving through the same places, thereby offering multiple ways of knowing and telling about a single setting.     

Feminist Knowledges as Interventions in Physical Cultures

Abstract

This collection explores how feminist knowledges work as interventions in physical cultures and recognizes the considerable contribution of feminist theories and methodologies in understanding the power relations implicated in embodied movement. Our introductory piece weaves together questions about the gendered formation of physical cultures (across leisure, sport, the arts, tourism, well-being, and various embodied practices) with key issues raised by contributing authors, from disciplinary perspectives to theory-method approaches. Exploring questions of digital and physical cultures, more-than-human relations, post- and decolonial ways of knowing, and contemporary onto-epistemologies, this feminist collection aims to contribute to the movement of ideas within and across physical cultural studies. Bringing together diverse perspectives around our common focus we entangle physical cultures with a range of gendered problematizations and interventions that produce different ways of knowing, imagining and doing feminisms.     

Buen Vivir: Degrowing extractivism and growing wellbeing through tourism

Abstract

Buen Vivir (BV) is a holistic vision for social and environmental wellbeing, which includes alternative economic activities to the neoliberal growth economy. This article looks at how tourism initiatives under a BV approach can lead to degrowth by drawing on a case study of how BV is put into practice through tourism in the Cotacachi County in Ecuador. We argue that by degrowing socially and environmentally damaging extractive sectors and growing alternative economic activities like community-based tourism, a BV approach could increase social and environmental wellbeing. We refer to LaTouche’s notion of degrowth as a matrix of multiple alternatives that will reopen the space for human creativity. This complements the notion of BV as a plural approach, and in turn works to decolonise the parameters of how we might understand degrowth. In the case of Cotacachi, the vision for tourism is based on the needs of the community, rather than to satisfy a Eurocentric ideal of development supported by a policy of extractivism. BV is key to how this community conceptualises the potentialities of tourism because it considers the wellbeing of the people and the environment. In this case, degrowth is a consequence of BV, rather than the objective.     

Young Muslim Women and Sport: the Impact of Identity Work

Abstract

This article focuses on the relationship between young Muslim women’s identity work and their involvement in sport and physical activities. The concept of ‘identity work’ is used to underline the dynamic aspect of identity construction. The study is based on life‐history interviews with 21 Muslim women with immigrant backgrounds living in Norway, aged between 16 and 25 years. The study demonstrates how young Muslim women’s identity work is influenced by their ethnic and religious collective identities. While some of the women situate themselves clearly within their ethnic identity, others challenge the boundaries of their ethnic identity and some of the young women choose to focus more on religion than ethnicity. The study illustrates two major patterns that link young Muslim women’s identity work to their involvement in sport and physical activity. First, being a young woman and participating in sport is seen as a challenge to the boundaries of their ethnic identities. Therefore, young women who position themselves clearly within the framework of their ethnic identities are not interested in sport because doing sport is not seen as a respectable femininity. The young women who challenge the ideal of femininity by participating in sport have experienced being sanctioned or harassed because they participate in sport. Second, among those who regard religion (Islam) as a more important source of identification than ethnicity, being physically active is seen as important because of Islam’s health aspects.     

Domestic tourism as a development factor

Archer, Brian H., “Domestic Tourism as a Development Factor”, Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. V, No. 1, January/March 1978, pp. 126–141. Domestic tourism brings about an intermingling of people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds and also a considerable redistribution of spending power. Although this paper concentrates mainly upon the economic effects created by the growth of domestic tourism and is illustrated by reference to some recent case studies, attention is also drawn to the favorable and unfavorable political, social, cultural, moral, environmental and conservational aspects of domestic tourism. The paper concludes by discussing some ways in which domestic tourism can provide an impetus to further economic growth in the holiday regions and also how domestic tourism may assist in solving some of the problems facing a country's international tourism.     

The politics of knowledge as a tourist attraction

The past ten years have seen an increasing interest in the politics of knowledge production in tourism studies. However, tourists’ hosts’ politics of knowledge, the ways in which tourists’ hosts can use local knowledge as both a tourist attraction and a way to negotiate power relationships, are yet to be explored. This article identifies the need for more analysis of the political uses of cultural knowledge as a tourist attraction, reporting on an ethnographic study of the politics of knowledge unfolded by an Aboriginal group of Western Australia in the context of their tour guiding activities. It will hopefully contribute to a better understanding of the political conditions, and potentials for, local cultural knowledge (re)production and utilization in tourism.     

How Cultural Differences Cause Dimensions of Tourism Satisfaction

Abstract

This paper develops a conceptual model of the relationship between different cultural values and how they influence consumer satisfaction in the tourism industry. It is hypothesized that cultural differences manifest themselves in different levels of importance being placed upon different aspects of service, and the differences between the levels of importance and the actual service received cause differences in the levels of satisfaction. These hypotheses are tested using 269 independent samples of levels of importance and 411 independent samples of satisfaction of tourists from four cultural groups (Australian, USA/Canadian, Japanese, Mandarin speakers) who visited Melbourne, Australia in the period May-September, 1996. The analysis develops dimensions of importance and satisfaction separately for each cultural grouping, and uses structural equation modeling (Amos 3.6) to develop the causal model measuring the way in which importance of service dimensions cause dimensions of satisfaction. Conclusions from the analysis show little evidence of a causal relationship between importance of service quality attributes and satisfaction. However, significant differences are found between cultures for different levels of satisfaction resulting indirectly from differences in the importance and actual levels of service received.

The implications for cultural differences affecting tourism satisfaction are discussed.     

Migrant relationships and tourism employment

This paper examines how tourism employment and workplace experiences influence migrant workers’ adaptation in the host society. It is argued that tourism employment provides access to multiple social networks, which subsequently supports the improvement of foreign workers’ social and cultural competencies. Such networks also help to compensate for the negative aspects of tourism work and migration. In addition, the paper considers how relationships among international workers inform chain migration and influence subsequent recruitment practices and migration experiences. The findings stem from a wider study of the experiences of Polish migrant workers employed in the UK tourism sector using qualitative and quantitative data.     

Locating leisure as the route to well-being: challenges of researching women’s leisure in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This article interrogates the relation of leisure to subjective well-being by focusing on the language-based challenges during empirical research, which deeply impact upon both the substance of the data collected and its interpretation, thereby the knowledge that is produced on leisure. Drawing upon the empirical data collected via qualitative methods, the article seizes on the relationship between women’s free-time, labour, leisure and subjective well-being. The findings of the research suggest that the translation of leisure as ‘free time activities’ in Turkish creates serious challenges in researching women’s leisure. Women in this research understand leisure in multiple ways, such as an escape from boredom, a sphere of recuperation, pleasure and self-fulfilment which altogether represent their understanding of leisure as a route to their subjective well-being. Building on these findings, the article aims to highlight the importance of ethnographically guided qualitative research in uncovering both the meanings of and the interdependence between leisure and subjective well-being in both Turkey, the focus of the study, and other comparable societies around the world.     

At once liberating and exclusionary? A Lefebvrean analysis of Gilda’s Club of Toronto

This study uses a Lefebvrean analysis to explore the ways social relations are negotiated and contested in the production of a quasi-recreational space called Gilda’s Club of Greater Toronto, a venue that provides complementary care and support to people living with cancer. It does so by asking how Gilda’s Club, as a social space, resists and/or reproduces the conflicts and challenges of care for people living with cancer. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre to guide the analysis, qualitative data collected from 26 club members were used to examine the production of the club as a conceived, perceived and lived space. The findings underscore the insurgent and transformative possibilities of a social space like Gilda’s Club for people living with cancer, while also exposing the club as a site of discriminatory practices wherein marginalisation was produced and enforced. The complex tension between these contrasting practices is explored.     

Internal migration,sport and the Scottish diaspora in England

Sport has been argued to play an important role for members of diasporic groups of various origins and in various locations. However, little attention has been paid to the role sport plays for ‘internal migrants’ who migrate to contrasting locations within a nation-state, despite the potential for significant contrasts in the prevailing sporting cultures found in different regions of the same nation-state. This article therefore aims to make a contribution towards understanding this relationship by reflecting upon the role sport plays for members of the Scottish diaspora living in England, drawing upon interviews and personal reflections from a number of Scottish ‘internal migrants’ located within the United Kingdom. In particular, discussion attempts to draw attention to the central role sport plays for these individuals in order to maintain a cultural attachment with their Scottish birthplace, given the relative lack of other cultural practices or associations which could be used to achieve this goal. Comparisons are also drawn with studies of the Scottish diaspora in more distant geographic contexts, as well as similar diasporic groups in the English context such as the Irish diaspora. These comparisons allow for a consideration of the impact of geographic proximity and cultural proximity on the relative importance of sport and other cultural practices for Scots living in England, identifying a number of important issues for those studying the role played by sport in the maintenance of a cultural attachment with ‘home’ for various diasporic groups.