Publication Announcement


The Tourism Studies Working Group is pleased to announce
 
TOURISM IMAGINARIES AT THE DISCIPLINARY CROSSROADS:
Place, Practice, Media

Edited by
Maria Gravari-Barbas and Nelson Graburn

[click here] for official Routledge site

About the Book:
Imaginaries of place, destination, and travel are increasingly produced and consumed by diverse populations through expanding forms of media and opportunities for travel. Defined as the potential power of a place as a tourist destination, these spatial imaginaries are collaboratively produced and are a nexus of social practices through which individuals and groups intersect to establish a place as a credible destination.
Bringing together an international team of scholars, this book provides a unique analysis of current multidisciplinary research on the complex relationships between tourism and the imaginaries of tourist destinations.
Tracing the links between tourism imaginaries and their religious (heaven) and political (utopia) antecedents, the opening of the book follows the growth of the disciplines exploring this concept in tourism up to their present parallels and convergences. The substantive chapters are organized into three main thematic sections, the first explores the touristic production and consumption of place imaginaries, the second analyses the way places are practiced through imaginaries and the role imaginaries play in the tourist experience and the final section explores the way images and the media participate in the creation of tourism imaginaries.

Editor Bios:
Maria Gravari-Barbas is Professor of Geography at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. She is also in charge of the IREST (Institute of Research and Higher Studies on tourism) and EIREST (Interdisciplinary Research Group on Tourism Studies). She leads the UNESCO Chair "Culture, Tourism, Development" and coordinates the UNESCO UNITWIN network of the same name.
Nelson Graburn is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. He is a founding member of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism, the Research Committee on Tourism (RC-50) of the International Sociological Association, and the Tourism Studies Working Group at U C Berkeley, and serves on the editorial board (for anthropology) of Annals of Tourism Research.