Beyond destination accessibility: tourism infrastructure across mobilities, technologies and embodiments

In this article, we contribute to debates regarding the nature and role of the World Social Forum (WSF) in the post-2010 period by employing the prism of assemblage thinking. By using the WSF 2016 held in Montreal, Canada as a case study, we outline the political potential of the assemblage approach, which allows activists and researchers of social justice and contemporary contentious spaces to address some of the intrinsic paradoxes in such mobilizations. The observation of some paradigmatic moments from the WSF 2016 offers a glimpse into the heterogeneity that shapes it. We address elements as diverse as actors' intentionalities, migration policies, urban landscapes, power relations, contents, and absences, arguing that assemblage thinking opens up innovative possibilities for analyzing multidimensional phenomena such as the WSF.

Rethinking the consumption of places

This paper aims to situate power in ‘niche innovations’ through an investigation of cycling inequalities in the city of Birmingham. Much research has focused on the sustainability and innovation potential of cycling. However, debates usually revolve around the power relations between cycling and the dominant automobility regime, thus ignoring the possible inequalities embedded within niches. This paper aims to contribute to such analyses by unfolding the multiple inequalities and relations of exclusion that can be embedded in the practice of cycling. Drawing on Mobilities research for the EPSRC Liveable Cities programme, it focuses on the car-dependent city of Birmingham, in order to explore cycling as a practice with various socio-material, infrastructural, political and economic entanglements that can embed, reproduce or generate new socio-spatial inequalities, processes of gentrification and immobilities. Through such analysis, this paper aims to situate power in examining niche innovations (see also). However, it also aims to underline that understanding and addressing such inequalities are central for not only locating cycling in the centre of developing a more sustainable mobility future, but also enabling a more sustainable future for cycling itself.

Mobility, Modernity, and Abroad

This thesis has developed alternative methods of operationalising neighbourhoods at multiple spatial scales and used them to advance our understanding of spatial inequalities and neighbourhood effects. The underlying problem that motivated this thesis is that many empirical studies use predefined administrative units, and this does not often align with the underlying theory or geography. Despite the extensive literature on neighbourhood effects and, more generally, on sociospatial inequalities, spatial scale remains an under-analysed concept. As a response to this research gap, this thesis takes a multiscale approach to both theory and empirical analysis of neighbourhood effects, highlighting the multitude of spatial processes that may affect individual outcomes of people. To operationalise this, we created bespoke areas (centred around each location) at a range of one hundred scales representing people’s residential contexts, primarily in the Netherlands but also in multiple European capitals. Using microgeographic data and a large number of scales combined with small distance increments revealed subtle changes in sociodemographic characteristics across space. In doing so, we provided new insights into ethnic segregation, potential exposures to poverty, and neighbourhood effects on income, all in light of the fundamental issue of spatial scale: The analyses of sociospatial inequalities are substantially affected by the scale used to operationalise spatial context, and this varies within and between cities and urban regions. The aim of this thesis was therefore not to find a single, ‘true’ scale of neighbourhood, but to acknowledge, operationalise, and better understand the multiplicity of spatial scales.

Theoretical principles and history of study of eventful tourism, his classification, and also modern state of this sphere, are considered in the article. Progress of eventful tourism trends are analysed on Zakarpattia and it is set that during the last years there are positive tendencies in relation to their development, in particular: the specialized tour operators that offer corresponding tours and the new objects of eventful rest are opened appear. It is educed that Zakarpattia is extraordinarily rich in traditions and ethnic colour and has considerable advantages for development of eventful tourism, as here is considerable tourist-recreational potential. In villages and small towns Zakarpattia the most various and interesting festivals and holidays pass that, it is possible conditionally to divide into three groups-guilty, gastronomic and folklore. Lately large popularity was purchased by the tours of flowers on Zakarpattia. Eventful tourism is perspective on Zakarpattia, with inexhaustible resource potential, and the programs of festivals are saturated, original and interesting and profitable. They assist to socio-economic development of area, popularization of potential tourist resources among a population. Important pre-condition of organization of festival tourism is the timely informing and advertising of events, popularity to information about her and organization of her systematic realization. Most permanent festivals have own web-sites, on that there is information about realization and program of measures, tourist infrastructure, transport report. Forming of positive image of region and increase of amount of tourists is assisted by tourist-informative centers that accumulate information about tourist-recreational suggestions. Without regard to plenty of festivals international status is had only separate from them. Therefore, in order to attract the attention of tourists to Zakarpattia, it is expedient to create the government program of assistance and development of festival motion and distinguish the regional centers of festival tourism. Such regional centers can be cities that are selected on the principle of scale and the possibility of representation of an event. Such centers in the region can be Uzhgorod, Beregovo, Rakhiv, Mukachevo.

Resilience in tourism studies has mainly departed from a socioecological system theory approach and has developed knowledge in relation to different tourism contexts. This approach has consequences for the conceptualization of resilience and sets limits. Calls for theory development on resilience see a need to take account of, for instance, politics and power relations, and conflicts over resources. As a response to this call, this conceptual article discusses the ontological underpinnings of resilience in tourism studies from an interdisciplinary approach and argues for a media place approach to resilience. From a general socioecological system approach a tourist place is ontologically constituted as a subject with clear boundaries even if it has interactions, relations, and dependencies. The tourism place is therefore constituted as a fixed entity in its essence, even if equilibriums can be positioned differently. However, tourism resilience is a complex issue that calls for additional perspectives. The proposed interdisciplinary media place approach follows changes and dependencies between mediatization of tourism places and changes in the resilience of tourism places. The role of mediatization and its significance for changes in places are put at the center of the analysis. The approach assumes that a tourist place is constituted as a verb that is constantly created and re-created in a process. Additionally, resilience in places must also be conceptualized ontologically as a fluid concept that evolves over time. To understand sudden and long-term changes in tourism place resilience, special attention must be given to nodes or flows of information that connect the media systems and constitute places. Further, the article concludes that resilience is molded by the politics of media practices. An interdisciplinary approach brings new answers to complex questions that cannot be solved from a single disciplinary perspective.

The relationship between sustainable tourism and glamping is the most effective means for the correct sustainable development of a tourist destination. Sustainable tourism is a way to develop activities in the context of an environmental space, without harming natural resources. Sustainability is driven by the operationalization of a planning model that aims to privilege all its dimensions, joining the concept of Sustainable Development and Accessible Tourism. In short, these concepts function as a way of integrating tourist use, improving the living conditions of local communities and preserving the environment. Tourism plays an important role in the world economy due to the potential of territories (material and immaterial resources). With the natural evolution of tourism comes sustainable tourism and, within the concept of sustainable tourism, ecotourism. This tourism segment is increasingly important and one of the fastest-growing new types of tourism. In this context, glamping is a recent and yet unexplored concept that derives from nature tourism. It emerges as a new trend where glamour is combined with camping. As a result, holidaymakers want to experience memorable moments in which they are in contact with nature without losing their essential comfort and the luxury of higher quality accommodation. This manuscript is a preliminary, qualitative approach to the Portuguese context and some cases will be presented (five cases) that illustrate the importance of glamping for the development of sustainable tourism. In an interdisciplinary perspective, this research presents inputs for tourism, marketing and sustainable development. At the end, suggestions for future research will be presented.KeywordsSustainabilitySustainable tourismGlamping and innovation

Assemblages and Actor-Networks: Rethinking Socio-Material Power, Politics and Space

It is a tenet of the anthropological archaeology of modern conflict that to understand landscape one has to be in it. Archaeologists and anthropologists regard historical research as a prerequisite preparation rather than being an end in itself. Disciplinary considerations notwithstanding, how have different kinds of fieldwork added new conceptual understandings of conflict landscapes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? This chapter outlines an innovative hybrid approach which has developed over the last twenty years using First World War case studies based on research in Belgium, France, Jordan and Slovenia. Crucial to this interdisciplinary agenda has been the work of colleagues in History, Geography, Heritage and Tourism Studies. The result is a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the landscapes of modern war that privileges no discipline, but draws on all of them. It provides a muscular response to the many issues raised by the unique cultural phenomenon that is modern conflict.

The expansion of extractive economies in Colombia disrupts human and ecological interactions in particular places. In response, Black communities have enacted different activist strategies, including legal mobilization around the multicultural reforms that took root throughout Latin America in the 1990s. However, these legal mechanisms in Colombia reflect a Pacific-centered bias, which ties Blackness to rigid ethnic and territorial definitions, marginalizing alternative identities and attachments to space. While recent scholarship in anthropology, critical geography, and political ecology has examined how multicultural rights shape state-ethnic group dynamics, less explored is how seemingly homogeneous groups contest exclusionary legal frames by integrating legal and contextual strategies across multiple scales. Drawing on critical geography, legal mobilization, social movements studies, and feminist political ecology, in this paper, we study the strategies and processes enacted by Black communities in the inter-Andean valley region in northern Cauca to contest illegal mining and associated developments. Building on ethnographic fieldwork, our analysis shows that laws are subject to contestation, renegotiation, and strategic appropriation. We show how subaltern groups strategically engage with legal and self-ascribed context-specific practices to prefigure political authority, allowing them to shape relations to space and nature and advance their pursuit of what we conceptualize as territorial justice. Through their dialectical engagement with the law, these communities assert territorial authority beyond strict legal definitions, shaping new political subjectivities that exceed identity boundaries imposed by legal frameworks while being institutionalized.

Reviewed by: Encounters with Islam in German Literature and Culture Kamakshi P. Murti Encounters with Islam in German Literature and Culture. Edited by James Hodkinson and Jeffrey Morrison. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009. vii + 269 pages. $90.00. The title of this volume overwhelms through the sheer breadth of its promise. The editors state that the goal of the book is not to "consider European, or, specifically, German representations of Islam solely as by-products of a larger Orientalist project," but rather to attempt to "enter into dialogue with Muslims and to afford them communicative rights of their own" (13). They insist that they do not "seek to open out a theoretical meta-debate," nor "to forge some spurious ideological or methodological unity" between the fourteen chapters of the volume (13). Consequently, it has proven particularly challenging for this reader to discover some coherence that unites these fourteen contributions in one volume. Despite protestations to the contrary, there appears to be a tacit admission that Edward Said's theories remain a useful conceptual tool throughout the volume (13). Nine of the contributors directly refer to Said's work. If Saidean Orientalism is indeed a sub-text, the inclusion of texts written earlier than the European post-Enlightenment adds yet another challenge to comprehensibility. Thus, this reader assumes the presence of a less contoured "Other" as providing a unifying element. Timothy Jackson describes how Christianity in the Middle Ages constructs an Islamic "Other" in order to protect its own belief system. Cyril Edwards reads Wolfram as an example of tolerance toward Islam. Silke Falkner's contribution brings greater awareness to the ways in which early-modern turcica helped construct the antagonistic "Other." Daniel Wilson confronts Said and asks whether the latter presents "an accurate portrayal of German encounters with Islam." He discusses Meiners and Herder as two men of the Enlightenment who are nevertheless implicated in Orientalist discourse. Yomb May's analysis attempts to unsettle the recognition of Goethe as a mediator between East and West. His defines an Orientalist "as a scholar researching Middle Eastern culture" and remains within traditional perceptions of the Orientalist as an unbiased, altruistic scholar whose only interest is in acquiring knowledge for its own sake (97). Said's definition of Orientalism is conceptually broad but historically specific (as Jennifer Jenkins points out in her article "German Orientalism: An Introduction"). The relationship between Occident and Orient can be only a relationship of power, of domination. However, May criticizes Anil Bhatti in his contribution to this volume for the latter's attempt to present Goethe as an impartial thinker (103). Although Bhatti senses Goethe's unwillingness to accept the absolute dichotomy of the relationship between East and West, he cautions against an all-too-uncritical appreciation of Goethe as introducing a counter-hegemonic discourse. James Hodkinson's discussion of Islam within German Romanticism convincingly shows how Novalis uses a Muslim woman (Zulima) to debunk stereotypes about women and Muslims as irrational (119). Hodkinson thus reveals a moment of willingness on the part of the Orientalist to engage in dialogue. Jeff Morrison discusses a German travelogue writer and a Swiss adventurer and their encounters with Islam. Whereas the Swiss, Burckhardt, affects an insider status, Riedesel insists on being an outsider, although, as Morrison convincingly argues, there are slippages in these roles. The special value of Morrison's contribution lies in his [End Page 106] emphasis on the unstable period of German/Swiss cultural development around 1800. Rachel MagShamhráin criticizes Said for his monolithic approach, and wishes to provide a "multidirectional" approach. She uses Sheldon Pollock's use of the term "eastern Orientalism" in order to accuse Turkey of Orientalist ambitions. In his discussion of "deep Orientalism," Pollock looks at pre-colonialist structures of domination within the Indian social fabric and suggests that these were easily co-opted by the British: The "[German use of British forms of domination] may suggest a sort of eastern Orientalism, in the service of a pre-colonial colonialism" (196, my emphasis). Consequently, MagShamhráin's view of the Ottoman Empire as the victim of Western Orientalist discourses is problematic. Realpolitik dictated that the Ottoman Empire, like other European powers, forge alliances. It...

Despite human geographers’ growing recognition of the need to explore how digital technologies are increasingly co‐producing geographies, the methodological implications of such forms of data production are rarely discussed. This paper explores how smartphones co‐constitute fieldwork when they are used as research instruments. Drawing from a research project on young people's nightlife in Switzerland, we use Ahmed's ideas of emotions to show how smartphones are not inert research tools but emotionally entangled in the field. We argue that doing research with smartphones visibly in fieldwork has an effect on the relationships between the people, practices, and places of the field site. More specifically, we propose that these effects of emotions call for a renewed scrutiny of research ethics, particularly as smartphones increasingly become part of research designs.

In the last decade, perspectives from criminology, environmental psychology, healthcare studies, and human geography have offered new ways of understanding the prison environment and the ‘affective’ potentials of carceral space which foreground the connections between place, space and what it is to be human and to survive imprisonment. Drawing on these interdisciplinary perspectives, this chapter examines the extent to which the limits of punishment, rehabilitation, and hope may be understood in the context of prison architecture and design. Drawing on the author’s experience as a consultant advisor on the design of two new prisons at different ends of the penal spectrum (a maximum-security men’s facility in Auckland, New Zealand and a women’s prison in Limerick, Ireland), the chapter argues that claims that ‘people-change’ (that is, rehabilitating offenders through design of prisons) may be over-ambitious in the context of incarceration. However, ‘context-change’ (in the sense of offering people in prison an alternative context in which to imagine their futures) may be an achievable goal. Context-change also includes the society in which any new prison is conceived and built.

In The Spatial Turn the editors begin by discussing the use of ideas from other disciplines within human geography. They claim that '[t]he discipline … has moved decisively from being an importer o...