Tourism and Leisure Mobilities

Politics, work, and play

Jillian Rickly, Kevin Hannam, Mary Mostafanezhad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138921054
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317415817
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book reframes tourism, as well as leisure, within mobilities studies to challenge the limitations that dichotomous understandings of home/away, work/leisure, and host/guest bring. A mobilities approach to tourism and leisure encourages us to think beyond the mobilities of tourists to ways in which tourism and leisure experiences bring other mobilities into sync, or disorder, and as a result re-conceptualizes social theory. The proposed anthology stretches across academic disciplines and fields of study to illustrate the advantages of multi-disciplinary conversation and, in so doing, it challenges how we approach studies of movement-based phenomena and the concept of scale. Part One examines the ways in which mobility informs and is informed by leisure, from everyday practices to leisure-inspired mobile lifestyles. Part Two investigates individuals and communities that become entrepreneurial in the face of changing tourism contexts and reflects on the performance of work through multiple mobilities. Part Three turns to issues of development, with attention to the cultural politics that frame development encounters in the context of tourism. The varied ways that people move into and out of development projects is mediated by geopolitical discourses hat can both challenge and perpetuate geographic imaginations of tourism destinations.

1
Introduction

‘New’ tourism and leisure mobilities – what’s new?

Jillian Rickly, Kevin Hannam, and Mary Mostafanezhad

The mobilities turn

We now, retrospectively, mark the mobilities turn in the social sciences as taking place in the early part of this century. Despite earlier claims about the conceptualisation of mobilities, this turn has proven to be far more than a cousin concept to globalisation (see Harvey 2006; Coles 2015). In particular, mobilities began to gain traction as a result of growing attention to increased opportunities for mobile interconnection and interaction through, for example, new communication, transportation, and media technologies. While researchers began to use the term mobility in new ways in the preceding years, the 2006 establishment of the journal Mobilities marked the solidification of a new field of social scientific inquiry. That same year, Sheller and Urry (2006) described the ‘mobilities paradigm’ as an approach that helped to frame the ways in which people’s daily lives are spatially interconnected; this includes the politics that drive (and hinder) the movement of people as well as objects, information, and non-human things. In other words, the mobilities turn has been less about a new topic of study and more about innovative and holistic ways of examining what social science scholars have long been observing (cf. Salazar 2010). When mobility is thought of as constellations of movement, representation, and practice, we can think through a more finely developed politics of mobility, one that works with mobilities and immobilities so as to deduce particular facets, such as motive force, speed, rhythm, route, experience, and friction (Cresswell 2010a: 17). This framework provides new ways of thinking about the interconnectivity of mobilities. As Hannam (2009: 109) argues: ‘Not only does a mobilities perspective lead us to discard our usual notions of spatiality and scale, but it also undermines existing linear assumptions about temporality and timing, which often assume that actors are able to do only one thing at a time, and that events follow each other in a linear order’.

Newness

Concerns have been raised by scholars regarding the framing of this approach as ‘new’. While Cresswell (2010a: 553; 2010b, 2012, 2014) advocates support for the mobilities turn, he is also hesitant to embrace its claims of ‘newness’:

The focus on the new is definitely a potential pitfall for a self-identified ‘new mobilities paradigm’ and there is a danger of an incessant focus on twenty-first-century high-tech hypermobility characterized by the car, the plane and mobile communications devices. There is also the danger of disconnecting new mobilities work from all the work on forms of mobility that geography has actually always been good at.

Indeed, an interest in movement, and more specifically the meaning of mobility, has long been a central concern of geographers, sociologists, and anthropologists, among others. If this is the case, why has the declaration of the mobilities turn been so widely adopted? Why does it resonate anew with so many researchers of movement-based phenomena? What does a ‘new mobilities paradigm’ mean for the social sciences, and for other areas of research (Sheller and Urry 2006)?

Perhaps it is best to start with the third, and broadest, of these questions. As Cohen and Cohen (2012, 2015a) observe, the mobilities turn has come about at a similar time to other interdisciplinary and postdisciplinary approaches, namely theories of performativity, non-representational theory and actor network theory. While each of these may be characterised by a distinct paradigm, they all inspire changes in perspective ranging from a move towards diachronic rather than synchronic analyses, a focus on fluid over fixed social patterns, and a widespread replacement of binary categories for the blurred boundaries of reality and virtuality (Cohen and Cohen 2012: 2180). Similarly, Salazar (2011: 576) notes that ‘as a polymorphic concept, mobility invites us to renew our theorising, especially regarding conventional themes such as culture, identity, and transnational relationships’.

Shifts towards phenomena in process and the collapse of dichotomies instigated a generation of scholars seeking a more inclusive reading of tourist practice that attended not only to mobility but to the politics and embodied nature of the practice. Such trends, as Cresswell (2010b) observes, encourage postdisciplinary research, particularly between the social sciences and the humanities. In fact, there are numerous examples of mobilities studies bringing together mapping and meaning, modelling and experience, practicality and ethics (see Cresswell 1999; Merriman 2007; Bergman and Sager 2008; Cresswell and Martin 2012; as well as the Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, Adey et al. 2013). A mobilities approach not only affords but necessitates deeply rich accounts of movement. Yet, as Salazar (2011: 576) explains, ‘mobility is a contested ideological construct involving so much more than mere movement’. Indeed, foundational works in this field by Kaufman (2002) and Urry (2000) mark this change in perspective by highlighting the ways in which notions of ‘society’, ‘nation’, and ‘global’ are being replaced by multi-scalar analysis that take into account the complex interweaving of scales of politics, bodies, objects, and movement. Research employing a mobilities approach has challenged these notions further, especially in the contexts of physical movement, representations of movement, and experienced and embodied practices and, in this way, ‘mobility studies have begun to take the actual fact of movement seriously’ (Cresswell 2010a: 18).

Scale

By drawing attention to the interlacing of movements of bodies, objects, technologies, information, and politics, the mobilities turn has also brought renewed interest in the concept of scale. Cresswell (2010a: 552) notes that linking different scales of movement in our research has the effect of understanding the ways individual movements add up ‘to more than the sum of the parts’. As Baerenholdt and Granas explain (2008: 2):

We are thus in a state beyond the dichotomy of the good local, so-called ‘internal’, control versus the bad non-local, ‘external’ control. Connections and encounters crucial to people’s lives are often much more complex and dynamic … Contexts are thus not predetermined at any scalar level, but only emerge with the practices of making and becoming places and mobilities.

In this regard, it is unsurprising that scholars have developed new concepts to deal with the multi-scalar and multidimensional fluidity of their objects of study. Concepts such as assemblage (Cresswell and Martin 2012), conjuncture (Li 2014), and constellations of mobility (Cresswell 2010a) are increasingly making their way into our academic arsenal to describe the complexity of what can, inevitably, never be perfectly described. Such attention to scales of movement focuses not only on human movements (bodily movements, daily circulation, diasporas, etc.) but recognises how the world is additionally composed of diverse movements of objects and ideas.

As a result, the mobilities turn has also born an interest in developing new mobile methods. While many mobile methods serve to complement traditional methodologies, they also can have the power of changing the research perspective in ways that illuminate previously unobserved processes (see Buscher and Urry 2009; Buscher et al. 2010; Merriman 2014). Methods that stem from geographical and anthropological material culture studies, such as research that ‘follows the thing’ (Cook 2004; Cook and Harrison 2007), illustrate the ways human and non-human mobilities intersect at various scales. Such approaches have even trended in popular culture, including the US National Public Radio programme Planet Money, which in 2012–13 aired a tracing of the economics of T-shirts, including where the design, fabrication, and distribution takes place. Other mobile methods, including mobile ethnographies, can both complement and complicate grounded ethnographies, as they change the focus of the research from a specific place and time to time-space produced in and through movement (see Germann Molz 2008, 2012; Vannini 2012).

Arguably, tourism studies has witnessed some of the greatest influence from the mobilities turn (Hannam 2009). Perhaps most importantly, approaching tourism from a mobilities perspective alongside other movement-based phenomena has provided a means to work past the dichotomies that have plagued traditional studies of tourism practice. Categorical, either/or ways of thinking of home/away, host/guest, work/leisure, among others, as well as strict notions of duration (more than 24 hours but less than one year) assigned by the UN World Tourism Organization, have become less important in defining tourism mobilities. As Cohen and Cohen (2012) observe, this transition from synchronistic to diachronic approaches has ‘destabilised the modernist view of tourism as a discrete activity; separated from, and indeed contrasting everyday life’ (2015a: 14; see also Franklin and Crang 2001; Hannam 2009). In so doing, this approach denies much of the extraordinariness of tourism by illuminating the ways tourism extends everyday life, albeit with reconfigured politics, work, and play for tourists, labourers and communities. But to say that tourism is simply a particular form of mobility only begins to hint at its relations, as different mobilities inform and are informed by tourism (Sheller and Urry 2006).

Where to turn next? New tourism and leisure mobilities

As a positive indicator of the fruitfulness of a mobilities approach, the previous decade of academic engagement has brought more questions than answers. Nearly a decade past the declarations of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, mobilities studies has become an interdisciplinary field of analysis in its own right. We can identify specific academic programmes dedicated to the study of mobility (for example, the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University in the UK, the Mobility and Urban Studies Program at Aalborg University in Denmark, Drexel University’s Center for Mobilities Research and Policy in Philadelphia, and the Cultural Mobilities Research Unit at the University of Leuven in Belgium). Indeed, mobilities studies has gradually moved from a scholarly turn to an institutionalised approach to research and learning. But what does the institutionalisation of a mobilities approach mean for training young scholars?

In particular, a mobilities approach to tourism and leisure encourages us to think beyond the mobilities of tourists to ways in which tourism and leisure experiences bring other mobilities into sync, or disorder, and as a result re-conceptualises social theory. In so doing, mobilities studies advances an agenda that thinks relationally about the politics that hinder, encourage, regulate, and inform mobilities at various scales, from the microbiological to the bodily to the national, as well as the mobility of information and non-human objects. Researching leisure and tourism mobilities involves an understanding of complex combinations of movement and stillness, realities and fantasies, play and work (Sheller and Urry 2004; Hannam et al. 2014). Studies of leisure and tourism mobilities have examined the experience of the different modes of travel that tourists undertake, seeing these modes in part as forms of material and sociable dwelling-in-motion, dwelling-in-tourism (Obrador Pons 2003), places of and for various activities. These ‘activities’ can include specific forms of leisure, work, or simply information gathering, but almost always involve being connected, maintaining a moving presence with others that holds the potential for many different convergences or divergences of global and local physical presence (Hannam et al. 2006, 2014).

Recent research has uncovered multiple ways in which tourism mobilities articulates overlapping yet distinct mobilities that call into question strict disciplinary boundaries around traditional subjects of analysis in tourism studies: lifestyle mobilities (Cohen et al. 2013; Duncan et al. 2014; Chapters 6, 7 and 8, this volume), lifestyle migration (Benson and O’Reilly 2009a, 2009b; Benson 2011; Chapters 5 and 11, this volume), labour mobilities (Kesselring 2014; Chapters 9 and 10, this volume), development mobilities (Peters 2013; Chapters 13, 14, 15 and 16, this volume), mobile hospitalities (Germann Molz and Gibson 2007; Chapter 12, this volume), post-humanistic mobilities (Obrador Pons 2003; Panelli 2010; Chapters 2, 3 and 4, this volume), postcolonial mobilities (Cohen and Cohen 2015b; Chapter 17 and 18, this volume), among many others. Breaking down tourism mobilities into mobilities that inform and are informed by tourism uncovers the multiplicity of objects and subjects in movement when tourism and leisure are enacted.

In this vein, this edited volume brings together research that challenges traditional conceptualisations of tourism and leisure but also pushes forward mobilities studies into new trans-disciplinary terrain. Throughout this collection, authors work at a number of scales of human sociality, from leisured bodies and labouring bodies to communities on the move and diasporas reaffirmed by mobility. Thus, a primary concept challenged and expanded in the following chapters is that of scale. By incorporating the mobilities of non-human bodies of leisure, corporations and international organisations, and tourism-oriented commodities into their investigations, the authors demonstrate the interlacing of tourism and leisure inspired mobilities by a variety of actors performing collectively. Indeed, these chapters exemplify changes in mobilities studies, as they are informed less by questions of what moves and to where, but rather why and how it moves.

The concept of scale is also reconsidered in the tourism and leisure mobilities research of this collection through the locations of research. While tourism research was once constrained by ideas of tourism as a spatially bounded, place-based activity, a mobilities approac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: ‘new’ tourism and leisure mobilities – what’s new?
• PART I Leisure
• PART II Work
• PART III Development
• Index