Tourism, sightseeing and embodiment
The deadline for 2012 Doctoral College Studentships has now passed.
The Brighton Doctoral College is pleased to welcome applications from self-funded or externally sponsored students for programmes of research in this or a closely related area, beginning from September 2012. Applications are welcome from students wishing to study full time or part time, and applications are welcome from students in employment who have the support of their employers.
- Based in the Faculty of Education and Sport
- Supervisors: Dr Catherine Palmer; Dr Jo-Anne Lester.
Application deadline
The university cannot guarantee that students can start at their requested date unless deadlines are met.
- UK/EU students: The deadline for the university to receive applications for an entry date of October is the 1 August, for January entry it is the 1 November and for May it is the 1 March.
- International students: The deadline for the university to receive applications for an entry date of October is the 1 June, for January entry it is the 1 September and for May it is the 1 January.
Within anthropology the body is studied from a variety of perspectives. For example, the body as culture and as text reveals a range of other bodies such as the gendered body, the medical body, the social and the performed body.
The tourist body is a significant yet neglected area of anthropology generally and particularly so in terms of embodiment, a way of understanding culture and the self in relation to practices of movement, thinking and sensing. Embodiment in tourism is a way of inhabiting the world through the sensory and corporeal engagement with the spaces and places that provide the motivation for sightseeing. The spaces and places of tourism are diverse and eclectic ranging from, for example, the coast and the countryside to the built environment. Such spaces offer a wealth of sightseeing opportunities, opportunities for engaging with the specific sights, attractions, buildings, monuments, structures, objects and ‘things’ that comprise the tourist experience. In visiting natural and man made tourist sites tourists walk through, stand in, touch and feel the world of the self and the other. Sightseeing in this context moves beyond a singular focus on the visual to one that sees the activity as an embodied expression of ‘being in the world’. By focusing on specific examples in which sightseeing occurs this topic will open up new ways of conceptualising how the body shapes and is shaped by lived experience. In so doing it seeks to make a significant contribution to the anthropology of tourism.
There are a variety of possible sites, structures and activities for contextualising the research. It is for the applicant to select and justify the specific focus.
Methodology: This is a phenomenological qualitative study with a range of possible research methods. Whilst the study is underpinned by the principles and philosophy of ethnography it is for the applicant to discuss and justify the specific method/s to be employed.
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