2004 Local Frameworks and Global Realities?
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CONTEXT
Tourism, just like globalisation, is a powerful mix of cultural, economic, and political phenomena; its multiple meanings and applications loaded with ambiguities. The continuing growth of tourism along with rapidly shifting positions in regional alliances and politics has exposed potential tourists to a bewildering array of images, destinations, and decisions on a scale hitherto undreamt. Since 9/11, global inventions of ‘Other’ have increasingly taken on a heightened political dimension, especially in the sphere of travel and thus tourism, so that these stereotyped constructions meet constantly shifting local frameworks and global realities. The consequences cannot be reduced to the simplistic idea of place and space becoming occupied only by vapid tourists and congenial, compliant local populations: tourism is simply too political, important, and valuable to be so dismissed. For example how is tourism and its related industries to deal with passports, borders and the politics of exclusion (migrants v tourists) in the light of increased (some say draconian) travel security measures?
Aim
Given that tourism deserves a more nuanced analysis than the familiar binary divisions (‘left-right’, ‘good-bad’, ‘right-wrong’, and indeed ‘hosts-guests’) can provide, the overall aim of the symposium is to provide platforms for critical discourse and reflection on tourism, politics, democracy, and resulting chaotic web of power relations.
Themes
- Cultural Politics: where culture and heritage become politicised, as increased competition, accompanied by the intensification of market forces, exacerbates existing tensions and forms of cooperation between regions and nations, as well as creating new ones;
- Power and Ideology: where socially constructed consensus about the nature and shape of tourism at a destination, and (perhaps more importantly), the consensus by which cultures acquire symbolic value, may reflect political imperatives and ideological currents, and thus can be directly linked to questions of democracy, power and citizenship;
- Politics, Risk and Security: the events of 9/11 and more explicit attacks on tourists, offer a stark reminder that the ‘unhindered’ mobility upon which travel depends, can be easily shattered. Tourism articulates with questions of freedom of mobility, the politics of security and the negotiation of risk, thus challenging the very notion that tourism can be separated from other areas of policy-making;
- Conflict and the Politics of Mediation: in the context of tourism and civil society, where politicians, academics, planners and managers seek solutions to the challenges of tourism especially in the context of transforming political economies and post-modern and postcolonial conditions;
- The Politics of Trade in Tourism: the local: global nexus where global realities such as GATT, GATS, World Trade Organisation, regional alliances, and the power of global corporations interact in a variety of ways with tourism, politics, and democracy at a local level including the privatisation of tourism spaces, labour relations, and the politics of work in tourism.