Abstract
We present in this issue four articles which lie at the heart of what Tourist Studies is about – the interrogation of identities, imaginations and issues that are played out and that arise through tourist/tourism practices in societies. Following from our earlier concerns regarding post-COVID tourism recovery (Ong and Frohlick, 2023) and new forms of tourism research genres (Frohlick and Ong, 2023), our editorial note for 23.3 showcases intriguing research in tourism mobilities and performances. From the journal’s inception, a mobilities lens has been a strength of Tourist Studies. The founding editors called for tourism researchers to look beyond the sublime in travel and to regard the ordinary and everyday in our mobile societies, specifically the published interview with mobilities theorist and advocate, John Urry (Franklin, 2001). So too has research in tourist performance been foundational. Tourist Studies’ command of tourist performance scholarship can be seen in Edensor’s (2001) foundational piece ‘Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism,’ and, later again, in Minca’s (2009) work on the role of imaginaries and construction and power. In this editorial note, we briefly trace this intellectual lineage, to sketch how the four authors build on and contribute to mobilities and performances frameworks, which have always been central to Tourist Studies.
Volume 23, Issue 3
This issue takes readers from examinations of tourism routes that are personal, public and planned to investigations of global scuba diving imaginaries to urban music tourism performances. Witte’s (2023) piece on China’s ancient trade route opens the issue, focussing on the Chamagudao and its contemporary adaptation as a heritage trail. Adopting a mobilities perspective, Witte (2023) shows how stakeholder efforts were centred on immobilising the ancient trade route’s historical and heritage narratives – and through that immobilisation the stories that thread through the attractions of the ancient route were ignored. In addition to connecting to themes of ‘mobile heritage’ in heritage studies, Witte’s work builds on Tourist Studies tradition of critical scholarship that both focusses on and interrogates the autonomy, agency and freedoms of individuals. Witte reveals the ways in which individual corporeal practices along the trail by tourists demonstrate a degree of power to challenge dominant discourses and narratives endorsed and promoted by a ‘top-down’ industry in China that officially constructs the site’s heritage tourism.
We then move from China’s Yunnan and Chamagudao Ancient Trail to other picturesque historical sites in Barcelona and Venice. Russo’s (2023) autoethnography casts intimate and useful insights into tourists’ negotiation of travel, migration and temporary dwelling in two of the most touristed cities in the world, in particular the tourists’ interactions with resident communities within these places. Rosso’s article illustrates the tensions between mooring and mobilities that can define touristic experience in both a personal and relational manner – in how individual experiences and emotions are constituted through encounters with an assemblage of entities in the two tourist cities. His methodological use of personal memoirs and notes that span across his life stages also elicits reflections into changes over time that relate to broader translocal urbanisms observed in Barcelona and Venice. Russo’s work builds on the journal’s strength in critical qualitative methodologies (Barry, 2021; Everingham, 2015; Varnajot, 2019; Yuan, 2022) and in particular, that of autoethnography (Magasic and Gretzel, 2020) as applied to mobile situations (see also Ong et al., 2023). Magasic and Gretzel, applied autoethnographic methodology to the study of information and communications technology (ICT) use in travel, revealint its paramount role in contemporary travel. Mobile autoethnographies were also employed by Ong et al. (2023) in their recent examinations of viral-hit panda and landscape tourism in China where they reveal how the delight, joy and anticipation of tourism could be dismantled by struggles, frustrations and anxieties brought about by COVID-19 pandemic measures and the fragility of tourism assemblages.
The third article of this issue brings us to the UNESCO ‘City of Music’, Glasgow. Here, Ord and Behr (2023) illustrate the ways in which hotels curate and configure the musical scenes of the city and in doing so present themselves as cultural experience facilitators rather than merely service providers. Going beyond an instrumentalist perspective, they focussed on what it means when tourism stakeholders re-imagine Glasgow’s music tourism as ‘experience’. Ord and Behr’s (2023) work adds to our critical scholarship that examines, through qualitative approaches, the role of art, festivals and music in tourism (see, e.g. Nanjangud and Reijnders, 2022; Ziakas et al., 2022). Moving beyond more taken-for-granted notions of music, sound and soundscapes in tourism constructions and performances, Frohlick and Macevicius’s (2023) feminist critique of soundscape and silence in tourism reveals the embedded moralism in our desired soundscapes, which encourages scholars to rethink silent tourism as ways of knowing.
Last but not least, Tunestad (2023) takes the study of tourist and tourism performances away from land and into the deep seas to query the sublime environments of coral reefs and more in scuba diving tourism. The study builds on studies on tourism performances concerning the presence of scripts and structures (Edensor, 2001; Law et al., 2007) to argue for how such ‘serious tourism imaginaries’ constitute collaborative and transformative social forces where tourists, communities and localities align in forms of ‘serious leisure’. To make his argument, Tunestad draws on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork to offer dedicated observations and interpretations of scuba diving worlds, joining previous studies of tourists encounters beyond land such as Merchant’s (2012) account of the ocean as sensorium. Tunestad’s scuba ethnography adds not only to our literature on tourism performance but also that of serious leisure (Liston-Heyes and Daley, 2017; Worthington, 2005; Ziakas et al., 2022).