Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
adjacent urban and fast emerging 'peri-urban' regions. Changing occupational structures,
career paths of the 'rural' folk, the impact of recent geopolitical change (following the events
of September 11) and the patterns of geographical mobility combined with demographic
factors and shifts in lifestyle and consumption patterns as a result of expanding markets are
likely to be areas for future research. Also, future research needs to consider rural destinations
with high, mixed and low tourism supply and demand structures to understand how places
are experienced by different actors and, importantly, how the place is shared with visitors.
For defi nite, more rounded geographies of rural tourism which refl ect the diversity of
spaces and consumers and different belief communities, and capture intra-gender differences
and the impact of the new ethno-politics of labour migration, would make research less
narrowly concerned with the economic imperatives of rural change and more focused on the
dynamism and heterogeneity of factors producing a variegated countryside. However, to
determine its economic usefulness, there is a need for more research on how and where
tourism has actually helped to reduce poverty without compromising the 'authenticity'
(Cohen, 1988: 371) of the place as well as studies that quantify the interactions between rural
tourism and poverty.
At the methodological level, the progress lies in the launch of the Journal
The Critical Turn
in Tourism Studies: Innovative Research Methodologies
, which is helping to understand how rural
actors' lives are organised from fresh perspectives and holds the real possibility of opening up
avenues to achieve reconfi guration in the subject matter. However, as Pearce (1999) rightly
points out, given that the community of tourism geographers in most countries is still very
small, the infl uence of the personal preferences, priorities and skills of individual researchers
plays a critical if as yet undetermined role in terms of what is studied and how (see also Gale,
Chapter 4
in this volume).
At the policy level, rural tourism geographers' intervention in public policy has led to
robust debates on pro-poor tour ism in A fr ica (see research by Ash ley
et al.
, 2001), geographies
of vulnerability focusing on species needing protection (see Abbitt
et al.
, 2000) and relation-
ships between tourism and climate change, particularly since greenhouse gas emissions from
transport continue to grow (see Hall, 2005c). Further, the panel overseeing geography in the
2008 Research Assessment Exercise in Britain has noted 'considerable strength of research
Geographers' commitment to research is also about defending academic freedom, as is
demonstrated by the international campaign launched to release Professor Ghazi-Walid Falah,
a political geographer and editor-in-chief of the journal
Arab World Geographer
, who was
arrested by Israeli police after taking photographs of rural landscapes in Northern Galilee
(Socio, 2010). Thus a broadening of focus on to multiple actors, issues, organisations, territo-
ries and technologies, together with an ensemble of social relations and interdependencies has
set in motion what may be termed the 'new geographies of rural tourism'.
N o t e
1
See:
http://www.rgs.org/GeographyToday/Geography+in+the+UK.htm#ixzz0qwMQs0vy.
