A mobilities approach to tourism from emerging world regions

Increasing numbers of people from the emerging world regions, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East engage in tourism practices at domestic, intra-regional and long-haul international scales. In this article, we deploy an innovative application of the mobilities approach, which we argue moves beyond the Eurocentrism implicit in modernist tourism studies, in a comparative analysis of tourism in and from these regions and those in the ‘West’. Our analysis opens up the systematic study of tourism in emerging world regions in terms of the mobilities paradigm, and concludes: one, travel had a multiplicity of origins in societies in the emerging regions, but most did not possess an equivalent emic term to ‘tourism'. Two, tourism at domestic and intra-regional levels tends to be entangled with other discretionary mobilities, whereas the long-haul level is more differentiated. Three, the development of domestic discretionary travel in emerging regions can be represented by four overlapping ‘mobility constellations’. Four, there are significant historical differences between the regions in their long-haul mobility constellations, although their kinetic hierarchies are all still steep. Five, forms of movement and associated practices of discretionary travellers from the emerging regions and Western countries became increasingly similar under the impact of socio-technological, economic and cultural globalisation. Six, differences between the emerging regions, particularly Asia, and the West are most salient on the emic level of representations of international travel: the specific cultural motive forces for tourism do not centre on authenticity-seeking, but are instead bound up with prestige and markers of modernity.     

Eurocentrism,capitalism and tourism knowledge

Global hegemonic structures of power have been a subject of debate among social scientists for decades. However, issues addressing the ‘subjugation of the intellect’ and forces shaping knowledge production – globalisation, capitalism and neo-colonialism – remain understudied in tourism. Drawing upon critical theories of Eurocentrism and capitalism, in this paper we explore and address the ideological impacts of existing global power structures on the next generation of tourism ‘knowledge producers’ in Asia. More specifically, this work critically discusses the ontological and epistemological beliefs – and subsequent methodological choices – of a group of Asian PhD scholars. The empirical material presented in this paper highlights that persisting forms of Eurocentric ideology embedded in capitalist structures of power permeate non-Western academic circles.     

Who's Afraid of Postcolonial Theory?

Recent assertions of urban theory have dismissed the value of postcolonial critique in urban studies. This essay draws on postcolonial theory to demonstrate key flaws in such theoretical formulations. In doing so, it returns to the puzzle of how and why studying urbanism in the global South might matter for the reconceptualization of critical urban theory. Instead of a universal grammar of cityness, modified by (exotic) empirical variation, the essay foregrounds forms of theorization that are attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituent of global urbanization. What is at stake, the essay concludes, is a culture of theory, one that in its Eurocentrism tends to foreclose multiple concepts of the urban and alternative understandings of political economy. A concern with the relationship between place, knowledge and power—a key insight of postcolonial critique—might make possible new practices of theory in urban studies.     

The global permutations of the Western publication regime

This article introduces the concept of the ‘publication regime’ into the current discourse on academia. This allows for a much deeper understanding of how publishing conglomerates and appointment and promotion procedures in Western universities are increasingly interlocked. It then turns to the global permutations of that regime as it is currently disseminated to other parts of the world. Using empirical examples drawn primarily from the field of tourism studies, we examine the problems engendered by the introduction of the regime’s appointment and promotion procedures of early career academic staff in universities in the emerging world regions. We specify the auxiliary mechanisms intended to ameliorate these problems, and draw attention to the neo-colonial implications of the disciplining process which these mechanisms are introducing into the academic life of the universities in the emerging regions. We argue that, as the Western publication regime is becoming increasingly globalized, local intellectual voices tend to be silenced by the regime’s growing hegemony, and call for the integration of non-Western perspectives into the framework of the publication regime.