Tourism Geographies Podcast

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2417853AbstractThis review tracks the genealogy of the term militourism and its development and use since the early 1990s primarily through the scholarship of Teresia Teaiwa. It begins with a discussion of the concept’s emergence, with particular attention to the Pacific region, and examines other sites where the term has shed light on tourism and militarism’s collusions. In addition, the review considers scholarship that works with and through the term militourism, but which do not necessarily engage with its specific analytic. The review also examines the centrality of race, indigeneity, and gender in militourism’s analytical scope, and notes how its origins in the militarized Pacific necessarily tether the term to land and decolonial struggles. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2495192AbstractThe global rise of heritage tourism has intensified struggles over the ownership, meaning, and spatial governance of religious sites, yet the contested interplay of ideology, power, and sacred space remains understudied. This article addresses this gap through a longitudinal analysis of China’s Famen Temple, where two decades of state‑led tourism development have reconfigured sacred space through historical reinterpretations, institutional transformations, and spatial negotiations. Drawing on critical heritage studies and qualitative fieldwork, the study reveals how official discourses strategically reframe religious pasts to align with contemporary economic and ideological agendas, manifesting in spatial restructuring, ritual commodification, and redistributed power among stakeholders. Heritage tourism here emerges as a contested process: state and commercial actors leverage tourism for territorial control and economic growth, while monks and local communities navigate, resist, and adapt to these changes. The tensions between economic imperatives, religious traditions, and authoritarian governance illustrate that sacred sites are neither passively secularised nor sacralised but continually redefined through socio‑spatial contestation. By framing religious heritage as arenas of political negotiation, this study advances critical debates on tourism’s role in spatialising state power, arguing that such transformations reflect broader global struggles over cultural legitimacy, authority, and the right to define “heritage” itself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2502507AbstractThis paper utilises bibliometric data on peer-reviewed publications to examine the characteristics and dominant narratives in overtourism research to date. Departing from earlier state-of-the-art reviews, it introduces a spatial perspective with a distinct focus on spatial processes and geographical scales. The analysis identifies six overarching themes in the literature, which predominantly centre on metropolitan contexts and are characterised by a normative critique of tourism. While the literature often identifies the causes of overtourism at either the global or local scale, proposed solutions tend to emphasise local-level responses, particularly through planning and destination management. The paper makes two key contributions: first, it highlights the need to broaden overtourism research beyond its current urban and metropolitan focus to encompass a wider range of geographical contexts; second, it emphasises the significance of engaging with geographies of scale to address overtourism not merely as a local planning challenge, but as a structural and systemic issue demanding multi-scalar interventions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2404643 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2515098AbstractTourism is vital in ensuring thriving communities in peripheral areas of the Arctic. However, many Arctic destinations have seen a dramatic increase in visitors, raising concerns about their ability to withstand tourism pressures. Simultaneously, socioecological systems in the region are undergoing rapid transformations with significant implications for future development. This study, based on qualitative research conducted from 2020 to 2024, explores how tourism actors at Arctic destinations navigate these changes and engage with various scales of tourism governance. Our findings highlight divergent approaches to governance: Svalbard’s top-down regime focuses on strict environmental preservation but faces resistance from local tourism actors, while Greenland is prioritizing tourism as a development strategy, aiming to balance national goals with local community needs. Despite differing views on regulation, tourism actors in both destinations seek greater involvement in tourism decision-making. We argue that employing place-based, collaborative, and adaptive governance approaches is essential to address common challenges such as sustainability, climate change, and (over)tourism in Arctic regions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.