Class Contemporary Tourism

Tourism has been a central dimension of globalization, and it can be used as a lens to reflect on many questions about identity and heritage, commoditization, historical and cultural representation, authenticity and ownership, neoliberalism, inequality, gender relations, and more. We will examine various forms of tourism, including, but not limited to: creative tourism, digital nomads and festival tourism. Themes of the gaze, authenticity, identity, consumption, ritual, and pilgrimage will be considered throughout the term. This course introduces tourism as an arena of contemporary anthropological enquiry, from the emergence of "the anthropology of tourism" as a subfield in the 1970s to the key theoretical debates of the present. 

Course contents:

1. Contemporary Tourism: social, economic and political dynamics in the impact of the tourism phenomenon and the complexity and richness of tourism.
2. Contemporary qualitative methodologies used in tourism research.
3. Tourism and its socio-anthropological implications and impacts in the contemporary world: a new phenomenon, both massive and selective at the same time. Modernity and postmodernity.
4. Commoditization, Cross-cultural encounters and Staged authenticity in tourism.
5.  Critical-analytical study of current model cases for Contemporary Tourism: Creative tourism (CREATOUR), Gastronomic tourism, Small-scale art festivals, Digital nomads, volunteer tourism and mass tourism.
6. Indigenous knowledge, Sacred Sights and Storytelling Rights
7. Tourism and gender
8. Tourism as a ritual

Digital pedagogy tools like Padlet and Menti and Escape rooms will be used and project-bsed learning methods will be applied to evaluated activities. Student reflection and discussion will be stimulated using various techniques such as team-based learning.

Samarathunga, W. H. M. S., & Cheng, L. (2021). Tourist gaze and beyond: State of the art. Tourism Review, 76(2), 344-357.Bruner, E. M. (1991). Transformation of self in tourism. Annals of tourism Research, 18(2), 238-250.

Co¿kun, G. (2021). Authentic Experience in Tourism and Commodification. Journal of Tourism Leisure and Hospitality, 3(2), 95-102.

Lehto, X., Davari, D., & Park, S. (2020). Transforming the guest–host relationship: A convivial tourism approach. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 6(4), 1069-1088.

Cohen, S. A., & Cohen, E. (2019). New directions in the sociology of tourism. Current Issues in Tourism, 22(2), 153-172.

Pritchard, A., & Morgan, N. J. (2017). Culture, identity and tourism representation: marketing Cymru or Wales?. In The Political Nature of Cultural Heritage and Tourism (pp. 383-396). Routledge.