Kellee Caton

Images of the Other Selling Study Abroad in a Postcolonial World

Representation of cultural Others in tourism texts is an important concern. Thus far, analyses of mass-mediated tourism representations have focused on promotional materials produced by for-profit agencies or by governments charged with encouraging development through tourism. Lacking have been assessments of materials produced by non-profit brokers with humanitarian missions. This study interrogates the promotional literature of one such agency, Semester at Sea (SAS), to determine whether its representational practices differ from the mainstream. Grounded in postcolonial theory and employing content, semiotic, and discourse analysis, it argues that although SAS embraces a mission of promoting cross-cultural interaction and global citizenship, the program nevertheless continues to (re)produce hegemonic depictions of non-Westerners, asserting a Western superiority ideology by polarizing the West and the Rest into binaries of modern-traditional, technologically advanced-backward, and master -servant and decomplexifying the globalization process by presenting the non-West as exotic, culturally pristine, and filled with happy natives.

The tourism education futures initiative

The tourism education futures initiative Dianne Dredge, Christian Schott, Roberto Daniele, Kellee Caton, Johan Edelheim & Ana Maria Munar a Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark b Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand c Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK d Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, Canada e Multidimensional Tourism Institute, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland f Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark Published online: 28 Aug 2014.

Critical event studies: approaches to research

However, this is probably a strength rather than a weakness of the framework for it could be used anywhere, as well as to guide comparative studies both within Asia, as well as between Asia and elsewhere. More generally, it is well worth asking whether Asia is so different from other places that it requires the use of novel concepts and methods, or whether the differences are of degree rather than kind, requiring the adaptation of existing concepts and approaches. Comparative approaches, which are seldom adopted in this book, may be helpful in exploring such questions, while acknowledging that local cultures and environments are always likely to be important. However, the authors appear to place priority on giving a voice to people whose voices may be seldom heard, let alone understood, and this is a worthy ambition. In summary, the editors have identified a theme and a region that certainly merit more attention. In this respect they have provided a useful contribution to the literature which, hopefully, will be a stimulus to researchers from the region as well as elsewhere, providing greater legitimacy for the use of qualitative research methods and the exploration of genders in their various manifestations, in contexts where academic research has yet to match the importance of these research approaches and topics. The book could certainly be used in a classroom setting to generate discussion on genders and tourism and the complexities of exploring their relationships. At the same time, the strong methodological exhortations have yet to reveal compelling insights as indicated in the limited empirical research that is included in the book. When coupled with the claim of a paucity of published research to draw upon, this suggests that the work is timely in drawing attention to the substantial research opportunity. At the same time, perhaps it is premature to publish a book when it is suggested that there is a dearth of relevant materials.

Pausing at the intersections of tourism moralities and mobilities: Some neighborhood history and a traffic report

Recent turns to morality and mobility have enriched the knowledge produced and used within the field of tourism studies. In this Special Issue, contributing authors intentionally merge, or grapple with in parallel, the terrains of tourism moralities and tourism mobilities. Our collective task has been to examine and critique these intersections for conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights that shift understanding toward what morality does or can do in relation to tourism mobilities (and vice versa). This introduction sets the stage for the five papers that follow. We summarize the moral and mobility turns, draw attention to epistemological contours and convergences within these analytical fields, and synthesize key insights from each paper to show the promise that tourism moralities and mobilities has for our field of study and practice.

Lessons from the Road: Travel, Lifewide Learning, and Higher Education

Programs across the higher education landscape, including tourism education, are increasingly embracing experiential learning approaches, as provided through field schools, study abroad trips, and international internships. Most work on the value of such programs has tended to start in the most obvious place, by focusing on the programs themselves, the experiences students have with them, and the outcomes that ensue. Lurking beneath work on organized study trips, however, are deeper questions about the connections between learning and travel itself. What is it about travel that promotes learning? Are there certain conditions of travel that tend to be relevant for facilitating particular kinds of learning, and even for potentially transforming the way people see themselves and the world? This article briefly summarizes the outcomes of an empirical study on the relationship between travel and learning, for the purpose of offering discussion regarding how the insights derived from this work might be useful in the development and management of educational travel programs, in order to facilitate transformational learning and empowerment among students.

Growing on the go? Moral development and tourism

Should researchers in tourism and leisure studies care about the growth and developmentof human beings as moral agents? Einstein famously remarked ‘It has becomeappallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity’. Surely, we facemany problems – war, for instance, or extreme poverty – for which our failure to findsolutions is less a matter of shortcomings in technological know-how and more a matterof insufficiencies in moral understanding or will. Humankind is ‘the moral animal’(Wright 1994), but as a species, we have given little attention in recent centuries tounderstanding or developing our moral capacity – tied to what Habermas (1987) callsour communicative and emancipatory needs – in comparison with the energy we haveexpended toward meeting our instrumental needs, through knowledge development inpursuit of security, longevity, material wealth creation and consumption-based pleasure.We have eradicated smallpox in a global population that numbered over four billion, wehave warmed the planet more than a degree in a paltry 100 years, and we have eveninvented a real-life version of a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak (Holly 2014). Thesesorts of grandiose, if sometimes dubious, feats are the result of our immense investmentin developing scientific understandings of our material world. Comparatively, we havedeveloped little communicative and emancipatory capacity to do things which, at facevalue, would arguably seem less challenging – say, ending human deaths from starvation(Singer 2009), intervening effectively in geopolitical conflicts before they result in full-scale genocides (Downing and Husband 2005), or simply not shrinking in awkwardnesswhen needing to interact with a terminally ill colleague (Stone and Sharpley 2008).Fromthestart,leisurestudieshasbeenbroadlyconcernedwithhumandevelopmentandflourishing. It has also been attuned to leisure’s social value – or the way that individualflourishing can help to advance the greater good – as highlighted in the traditional sociallypositive connotation of recreation. In contrast, a thirst for instrumental need (or desire)fulfilment has tended historically to drive knowledge production in tourism studies, whichhas largely been discursively constructed through a lens of neoliberal marketization as an‘industry’ (Tribe 2008; Higgins-Desbiolles 2006), aimed to produce return-on-investmentfor capital, pleasure for tourists and ‘development’ for communities (where developmentgenerally seems to refer to an increase in material standard of living). But tourism is also aspace of rich human encounter – a practice through which different individuals withdifferent biographies from different cultures and life-spaces viscerally collide. Organiza-tions ofnolessmagnitudethantheUnited Nations have recognizedtravel’scapacity inthisregard (Higgins-Desbiolles 2006). More than one billion of us are now on the move

Rock of our salvation: ideological production at the Christian youth music festival

ABSTRACT Christian youth music festivals (CYMFs) are an important niche sector in the realm of large-scale leisure events. In line with the recent turn towards exploring festivals and events as spaces of cultural production and articulation, this compressed time ethnographic study analyses two very different Protestant CYMFs – one of which is affiliated with conservative Christianity and one of which is affiliated with counterculture Christianity – and investigates the way these leisure spaces function as sites where ideologies are produced and religious identities constructed. It concludes that, despite the festivals’ differences in ideological orientation, both events draw on the mechanisms of leveraged liminality, embodied performativity, and youthful impressionability to advance their respective ends. The paper thus seeks to highlight the ideological importance of leisure event management.

Ethics for a Wild World

If you are reading this special issue of the Journal of Teaching in Travel and Tourism on “Celebrating the Disruptive Power of Caring in Tourism Education,” then odds are you either are a postsecondary educator, or you plan to become one in the future. If this description fits you today, in 2018, then you are likely familiar with contemporary reigning conceptualizations of higher education as something that can be measured, managed, and controlled to increase and ensure “quality.” In some areas of Canada, where the two of us currently work as associate professors in university tourism and leisure programs, this fascination with quality control has settled in around the notion of “learning outcomes” – statements that describe the knowledge or skills a student will have acquired upon completion of an assignment, a course, or a program of study (Centre for Teaching Support and Innovation (CTSI), 2017). Crucial to the idea of learning outcomes is that they are declared up front, before a student begins, what an alterative conceptualization of education might call, the journey of that particular learning endeavor. Exercises geared toward the development of learning outcomes often take something called “Bloom’s Taxonomy” (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001; Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956) as their point of departure. Bloom’s work involved a structural analysis of intellectual processes, which he discretized into the actions of remembering, comprehending, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating. His structure was arranged in a hierarchy, with remembering at the bottom, rising through the other mental processes, toward evaluating as the most sophisticated and advanced intellectual action. He then advocated for a curriculum with modules sequenced in the same hierarchical way, with achievement being measured at each stage, to ensure the student had mastered the content he was supposed to, via the given mental process, before moving along to take the next step up the ladder (Doughy, 2006). Bloom’s mission was a noble one. Working in the United States in the era immediately following World War II, when university enrollment had swelled due to the GI Bill, which offered educational opportunities to veterans, Bloom attempted to upend reigning cultural assumptions of the day that successful performance in education was primarily the result of innate intelligence, arguing instead that many students who performed poorly lacked problem-solving skills, and that this was something that could be taught (Doughy, 2006). In other words, he sought to shift more of the responsibility for student learning onto the institutions that designed and delivered curriculum, rather than allowing them to rest complacently on stereotypes about student performance, and therefore, to contribute to the progressive cause of democratization of higher education (Doughy, 2006). But in his approach, Bloom was very much a product of his day, and his belief that a process as highly abstract, dynamic, and complex as learning could be operationalized and measured to produce valid understandings was fully in step with the postpositivistic epistemological and methodological currents of his time. JOURNAL OF TEACHING IN TRAVEL & TOURISM, 2018 VOL. 18, NO. 1, 1–7 https://doi.org/10.1080/15313220.2017.1403802

Tourism’s Imperative for Global Citizenship

We are far from the first to note tourism’s central paradox: It is a global industry, characterized by flows of people, capital, information, symbols, and material goods that circulate, penetrating almost every corner of the world. At the same time, however, its subject matter is the local (Salazar, 2010). We typically travel to experience that which is, on some level, different to home. Amongst the many and diverse motives for travel, a frequently observed undertone is curiosity about others’ cultures, their spaces, and their identities. Like the “authentic” others we seek to visit, our own primary identity ties have traditionally been grounded in the local. There are deep biological reasons for this historical pattern, having originally to do with our genetic linkages to those in our immediate community, in the days when tribal villages were the dominant social organizing unit for most of the human family (Berreby, 2005; Wright, 1994). Social reasons also lie behind our tendency toward provincial loyalties; indeed, the production of a sense of group identity at the local, regional, or national level has frequently been pursued by governments across history, for both noble and dubious purposes