Paul Hanna

Everyday climate discourses and sustainable tourism

ABSTRACT Debates surrounding the human impact on climate change have, in recent years, proliferated in political, academic, and public rhetoric. Such debates have also played out in the context of tourism research (e.g. extent to which anthropogenic climate change exists; public understanding in relation to climate change and tourism). Taking these debates as its point of departure, whilst also adopting a post-structuralist position, this paper offers a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of comments to an online BBC news article concerning climate change. Our analysis finds three key ways responsibility is mitigated through climate change talk: scepticism towards the scientific evidence surrounding climate change; placing responsibility on the “distant other” through a nationalistic discourse; and presenting CO2 as “plant food”. The implications of these ways of thinking about climate change are discussed with a focus on how this translates into action related to the sustainability of tourism behaviours. In doing so, it concludes that a deeper understanding of everyday climate talk is essential if the tourism sector is to move towards more sustainable forms of consumption.

A break from ‘reality’: An investigation into the ‘experiments with subjectivity’ on offer within the promotion of sustainable tourism in the UK

In recent years concerns surrounding the impact of humans on the environment and other humans have been increasingly voiced in the West, particularly in relation to the production–consumption chain. This article aims to explore the trajectories of these social and environmental concerns via the promotion of an explicitly ethical product: sustainable tourism. What follows shall presents a brief account of the ways in which consumer goods are increasingly suggested to offer a means to the ‘external’ promotional of an ‘internal’ self. With this in mind it will then be suggested that such a vision of the self is too simplistic and Foucault’s understanding of power, knowledge and ethics briefly presented. This article shall then move on to explore the methodology adopted in the present research, offering an account of the use of the internet in data collection and the framework for analysis employed. Following this the article will turn to explore, via the promotion of sustainable tourism on the internet, the ways in which potential sustainable tourists are being invited to understand themselves as ‘ethical’ and ‘experiment with subjectivity’. Finally, some brief thoughts will be offered regarding the implication of such understandings of ethics and sustainability for both the potential tourist and host community.

Your past is not their present: Time, the other, and ethnocentrism in cross-cultural personality psychology

Recent cross-cultural studies of personality traits have been ambitious in their scope, bringing together dozens of researchers to measure personality across many cultures. The key claim made in this paper is that a persistent form of ethnocentrism mars the presentation and interpretation of findings in cross-cultural studies of personality traits using evolutionary approaches. It is a form long-established as problematic and referred to in anthropology and related social science disciplines as allochronic discourse. A significant research report will be analysed to explore how allochronic discourse, conceptualizations of time, and representations of “otherness” are utilized. The reproduction of allochronic discourse is argued to indicate a need for cross-cultural personality psychologists to engage in multi-disciplinary debate, embrace innovative methodologies, and acknowledge the cultural specificity of its own conceptual frameworks.

Foucauldian Discourse Analysis in Psychology: Reflecting on a Hybrid Reading of Foucault When Researching “Ethical Subjects”

This article attempts to address a novel dilemma the author recently faced when undertaking qualitative psychological research into sustainable tourism. The article embraces notions of reflexivity to highlight how the research process was far removed from the sanitised version often presented in research methods textbooks. The article provides a reflexive account of the struggles of analysing Internet and interview data in relation to sustainable tourism via the dominant version of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis familiar to many qualitative/critical psychologists. Turning to an account of Foucault’s later work on ethics, this article presents an alternative approach to Foucauldian Discourse Analysis that adopts a hybrid reading of Foucault’s work on power, knowledge, and ethics. Drawing on Foucault’s four precepts helps us explore the ways individuals “cultivate the self as an ethical subject,” and interview data are presented to highlight the ways such an approach can enrich analysis. It is concluded that while presenting issues surrounding understandings of structure and agency, such an approach did offer a pragmatic solution to an ethical question and may indeed be useful in a range of other areas.

Reconceptualizing subjectivity in critical social psychology: Turning to Foucault

This article focuses on a reading of Foucault which draws on “technologies of the self,” as opposed to “technologies of subjectivity,” and examines the relevance of this work for critical psychology. The article draws on consumerism to highlight the ways in which contemporary individuals understand, and are understood, through a desire to “know oneself.” Attention then turns to Foucault’s understanding of the precept “care for the self” to explore the ways in which this enables a reconceptualization of contemporary consumers as both positioned and capable of agency. The article argues that psychology could usefully benefit from an understanding of subjectivity that acknowledges existing power knowledge structures, whilst also looking for moments of resistance via individual techniques such as critical self-reflection, reciprocal relationships, and ultimately a “care of the self.” This article attempts to advance the interpretation of Foucault within critical psychology and suggest an alternative for theorizing subjectivity.

Positive self-representations, sustainability and socially organised denial in UK tourists: discursive barriers to a sustainable transport future

ABSTRACT This paper provides an empirical application of some recent developments in the social science of sustainability to understanding sustainable transport behaviour. We analyse talk about holidaymaking taken from interviews with self-defined “eco” or “sustainable” tourists. The focus of this paper explores the ways in which participants understand and reconcile the potential conflict of air transport and the notion of sustainable holidays. We identify a number of discursive strategies participants used to project and maintain positive self-representations in the context of complex, often incompatible constructions of sustainability derived from this particular dilemma. Such strategies are considered as concrete examples of the psychosocial organisation of denial and thus offer discursive barriers to sustainable transport futures. However, the analysis also demonstrates the ways in which some individuals were able to resist or challenge such forms of socially organised denial. The potential implications of these discursive barriers and strategies for sustainable transport futures and the tourism sector are discussed.

Consumer priorities: what would people sacrifice in order to fly on holidays?

ABSTRACT Holidaying is an important leisure pursuit and, for a growing minority, air travel is the default mode for holiday mobility. However, the current trend of increasing demand for air travel runs contrary to climate-related sustainability goals. Efforts to motivate reductions in consumption of holiday air travel must contend with the embeddedness of flying as a social practice and should be informed by an understanding of how people prioritize air travel for holidays relative to other forms of consumption. Using data drawn from a survey of 2066 British adults, this exploratory study uses a novel method to assess the willingness of individuals to sacrifice holiday air travel relative to their willingness to make changes to their daily consumption patterns. We find a greater readiness to undertake additional expense (of time, effort, or money) than to retrench incumbent consumption patterns in order to fly for holidays. Reluctance to sacrifice for the sake of flying was greatest with regards to those items that are most associated with the basic infrastructure of modern life (e.g. mobile phones). Examining product-specific pro-environmental sacrifice in relative terms, our findings suggest that voluntary reductions in flying are more plausible than other modes of pro-environmental sacrifice.

Parasitic encounters in debt: The UK mainstream credit industry

Part of making visible the complex of institutions and practices that create and make knowable experiences of debt-related distress is to focus on the classed nature of these experiences. Contemporary bureaucracies of debt and distress need to be understood as reproducing divisions of status, power, and access to resources. The imposition of precarious forms of wage labour for those trapped at the bottom of what is an increasingly polarizing class structure has been shaped by very specific sets of financial practices where a deregulated personal debt industry has integrated subordinate classes into a web of financial relations through private pensions, consumer credit, and mortgages. This article draws upon empirical research with a range of stakeholders in the UK mainstream credit industry. We contend that the institutional logics, discourses, myths, and operational processes of the variety of agencies and actors in the UK mainstream credit sector have, through the radical changes of financial liberalization, evolved into a functional industry. This industry serves to enable, support, and enact social relational and economic practices that can best be understood through the metaphor of parasitism. This paper explores the specific organizational and relational practices that allow the financial exploitation of a beleaguered precariat.

Building a New Community Psychology of Mental Health

This book provides a much-needed account of informal community-based approaches to working with mental distress. It starts from the premise that contemporary mainstream psychiatry and psychology struggle to capture how distress results from complex embodied arrays of social experiences that are embedded within specific historical, cultural, political and economic settings. The authors challenge mainstream understandings of mental health that position a naive public in need of mental health literacy. Instead it is clear that a considerable amount of invaluable mental distress work is undertaken in spaces in our communities that are not understood as mental health treatments. This book represents one of the first attempts to position these kinds of spaces at the center of how we understand and address problems of mental distress and suffering. The chapters draw on case studies from the UK and abroad to point toward an exciting new paradigm based on informal community and socially oriented approaches to mental health. Written in an unusually accessible and engaging style, this book will appeal to social science students, academics, practitioners and policy makers interested in community and social approaches to mental health.

Some Possible Directions for the Future

When we were children watching the various James Bond movies that repeatedly played on our televisions over the years, we were struck by a thought. The same thought each time. This was the case whether it was Max Zorin seeking to trigger an earthquake to flood silicon valley in order to take over the world microchip market (A View to a Kill, for those interested), Hugo Drax seeking to destroy all life on earth (Moonraker) or Stromberg pursuing his nuclear missile launch to destroy Moscow and New York City and hence triggering a global nuclear war (he would survive in an underwater sea empire of course). The same thought occurred—if they’d only been a little more modest in their aims, then there was a fair chance that their outcomes might have been a little more favourable. We can’t say in all honesty that James Bond was at the heart of our epistemological reflections when we sat down to write this book but what has become clear, now that we are at the end looking back, is that we never set out with the intention to ‘James Bond’ the world of mental health. Indeed our aims were far more modest and there are a number of reasons for this.