تحولات و مسائل کلیدی در تحرک گردشگری

This paper examines key developments in recent tourism mobilities research. It begins by outlining the recent conceptualisation of tourism mobilities, arguing that it is not just that tourism is a form of mobility like other forms of mobility but that different mobilities inform and are informed by tourism. It then examines work which has been developed in terms of materialities, autmobilities and new technologies. It concludes by discussing mobile methodologies and some thoughts on future research directions.

In March 2013 it was widely reported that ten people had been arrested in Hong Kong under new regulations restricting the amount of baby milk formula being taken into mainland China. Since 2008 when the chemical melamine contaminated baby milk formula in China led to the deaths of six babies and the sickness of an additional 300,000 babies, Chinese parents have sought supplies from outside mainland China. This has led to the phenomena of baby milk tourism, with Chinese tourists visiting the UK and Australia as well as Hong Kong, buying up baby milk formula to take back or send back to China leading to a shortage in these countries and subsequent rationing. While this ostensibly reflects food security concerns, it also highlights issues of tourism mobilities—how tourism is intimately involved and predicated on the movement of a whole range of materialities, fuelled, in part, by new forms of Chinese outbound tourism and increased aeromobilities, and how such mobilities are increasingly regulated by governments leading to immobilities. This paper thus reviews work from what has been termed the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006) and what has become known more recently as the study of ‘tourism mobilities’ by examining the materialities, automobilities and technologies involved in making tourism happen. These themes have been chosen as they illustrate many of the key issues involved in contemporary tourism mobilities. Tourism research has paid attention to the material through, for example, heritage tourism, but a mobilities approach demonstrates the integral importance of various materialities for tourism performances. Tourism researchhas also considered its relationships with transport previously, however we contend that a focus on automobilities allows us to show how discourses and practices of ‘freedom’ implied by driving underline the contemporary tourism experience in some contexts. Similarly, the use of new technologies have also given much hope of transforming tourism practices and we illustrate this by examining the ways in which mobile technologies have become integrated with being on the move but also the limitations that this also brings. Finally, we also outline some recent work which has developed what have become known as ‘mobile methodologies’. In the remainder of this introduction we develop the argument for a mobilties approach to the study of tourism. The study of tourism has often been seen as on the periphery of the social sciences, however, the mobilities paradigm arguably allows us to place tourism at the core of social and cultural life rather than at the margins (Coles and Hall, 2006 and Hannam, 2009). From this perspective, tourism mobilities are viewed as being bound up with both everyday and mundane journeys as well as with themore exotic encounters that have been the mainstay of much of the analysis in contemporary tourism studies. Tourism is then analysed not as an ephemeral aspect of social life that is practised outside normal, everyday life. Rather it is seen as integral to wider processes of economic and political development processes and even constitutive of everyday life (Coles and Hall, 2006, Edensor, 2007, Franklin, 2003, Franklin and Crang, 2001 and Hannam and Knox, 2010). It is not just that tourism is a form of mobility like other forms of mobility such as commuting or migration but that different mobilities inform and are informed by tourism ( Sheller & Urry, 2004). In any situation, mobilities involve the movement of people, the movement of a whole range of material things, and the movement of more intangible thoughts and fantasies. Mobilities also involve the use of a range of technologies both old and new. In short, proponents of the mobilities paradigm argue that the concept of mobilities is concerned with mapping and understanding both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space, and the travel of material things within everyday life simultaneously ( Hannam, Sheller, & Urry, 2006). In terms of mapping the larger-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world a mobilities perspective allows us to analyse the connections between tourism and geopolitics critically. In terms of tourism, foreign policy discourses can have profound effects on when, who and for what reason people are able to freely across international borders. Geopolitical discourses or ‘scripts’ as shown in a variety of institutional and popular media, are thus powerful, and as they divide up the world, can lead to conflicts over space and resources (O’Tuathail, 2002). Raoul Bianchi (2007) has analysed the relationships between tourism, the freedom to travel and the geopolitics of security. He argues that implicit in much of contemporary geopolitics is a western liberal ideal discourse of tourism as freedom (for some but not for others). He writes of how “tourism and particular destinations can become drawn into political conflicts when accumulated local grievances (linked to poverty, ethnicity or questions of religious identity) and wider geopolitical imperatives collide.” Moreover, “[w]here perhaps tourism becomes even more closely intertwined with global geopolitics is in the mapping of global risk and threats to security through the mechanism of state travel advisories” (Bianchi, 2007, p. 70). Advisories such as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in the UK are extremely powerful in portraying a dominant Western worldview. The mobilities of global tourism, then, are intimately entwined with broader geopolitical issues such as migration, inequality and indeed, climate change. From this perspective the relations between migration, return migration, transnationalism, and tourism are thus being increasingly researched (King & Christou, 2011). And, of course, the ways in which physical movement pertains to upward and downward social mobility are also central here as research on expatriates demonstrates (Butler & Hannam, 2013a). In such a context we need to examine how tourism becomes part of this social mobility and how it relates to new cultural identities and notions of cultural citizenship particularly in the contact zones mentioned above. Global tourism mobilities also entail distinct social spaces or ‘moorings’ that orchestrate new forms of social and cultural life, for example, stations, hotels, motorways, resorts, airports, leisure complexes, beaches, galleries, roadside parks and so on. Tourism mobilities examine the embodied nature and experience of the different modes of travel that tourists undertake, seeing these modes in part as forms of material and sociable dwelling-in-motion, places of and for various activities (see Featherstone, 2004). These ‘activities’ can include specific forms of talk, work, or information-gathering, but may involve simply being connected, maintaining a moving presence with others that holds the potential for many different convergences or divergences of global and local physical presence (Hannam et al., 2006). For example, recent work by Sattar, Hannam, and Ali (2013) has illustrated this by examining religious obligations to travel for the Pakistani disapora in the UK. Indeed, places become important for tourism mobilities in this context. Often a clear distinction is made between places and those travellingto places; pushing or pulling people to visit. The mobilities paradigm argues against the ontology of distinct ‘places’ and ‘people’. Places are thus not somuch fixed but are implicated within complex networks through which “hosts, guests, buildings, objects and machines” are contingently brought together to producecertain performances (Hannam et al., 2006, p. 13). Moreover, places are also “about proximities, about the bodily co-presence of people who happen to be in that place at that time, doing activities together, moments of physical proximity between people that make travel desirable or even obligatory for some” (Hannam et al., 2006, p. 13). In their discussion of Singapore as the archetypal ‘mobile city’, Oswin and Yeoh (2010, p. 170) thus argue that the: notion of the ‘mobile city’ thus makes us think about flows and movements in and through the global city in specific ways. It of course facilitates the study of migration as more than a movement from one end point to another. Attention is called to the lines that connect points, to journeys and their continuous negotiations. … The interrelationships between mobile experiences also come into view. Further, the study of the mobile city extends our interest to the study of the movement of ideas and material things that may or may not coincide with the movement of people. … So the mobile city approach understands the city as much more than a calculation of border-crossing labour and capital inputs and outputs. A process-orientation enables examination of interrelationships of movements of people, objects, capital and ideas in and through the overlapping scales of the local, the bodily, the national, and the global. Although mobilities research emphasises the inter-relation of different scales as discussed by Oswin and Yeoh (2010) above, in what follows we outline aspects of research into tourism mobilities in terms of three inter-related aspects: firstly, materialities, secondly, automobilities and thirdly, new technologies. We recognise that this list is not exhaustive, but we aim to show how the tourism mobilities approach is useful for understanding the importance of tourism research in the contemporary world.

Conclusions This paper has sought to give some insights into the multiple mobilities that may be involved in the study of tourism mobilities. The ‘new mobilities paradigm’ arguably allows us to place travel and tourism at the centre of social and cultural life rather than at the margins and this paper has discussed how this might be applied in the development of a research agenda for materialities and technologies that constitute tourism mobilities. Nevertheless, there are many other aspects of tourism mobilities from walking to different practices of air travel that could also be considered. Tourism mobilities have had significant impacts on the global environment and these impacts will continue to be felt as emerging economies develop and engage with mobile technologies. The transition to a post-carbon future will potentially open up many new technological configurations for tourism mobilities but at present the demand for further automobilities will continue to grow. Moreover, as the recent mobilities and immobilities of global capital continue to suggest, places and politics will remain paramount in our discussions of tourism mobilities. Researching tourism mobilities can also involve the use of mobile methodologies. Researchers often complain about the problems of doing research outside and of how their recordings with respondents have ‘background noise’ which makes it difficult to transcribe interviews. While there are computer programmes which will seek to minimize such ‘background noise’ we contend that such ‘noise’ is very much part and parcel of doing mobilities research. It is this noise which makes the recordings more intelligible, not less, providing valuable insights into the frictions and turbulence created by mobile people and things. Rather than eliminating or complaining about the noise, we would encourage researchers to actually research the noise, as this is the very stuff of tourism mobilities. Doing mobilities research thus involves paying attention to how people, things and seemingly intangible entities such as ideas are on the move, as well as how environments themselves make a difference. If we are to adequately understand the ontology of contemporary mobilities then we also need to have mobile methodologies not necessarily to ‘capture’ but to keep pace with the fluid (dis)order and (dis)embeddedness of (de)territorialized social life (D’Andrea, 2006). Firstly, “researchers will benefit if they track in various ways—including physically travelling with their research subjects—the many and interdependent forms of intermittent movement of people, images, information and objects” (Büscher & Urry, 2009, p. 103). Secondly, “as a consequence of allowing themselves to be moved by, and to move with, their subjects, researchers are tuned into the social organization of ‘moves’” (Büscher & Urry, 2009, p. 103). Such research may provide a new critical window on the mobilities, immobilities and moorings of contemporary social life by utilising innovative, experimental and increasingly sophisticated technologies (Büscher et al., 2011, Fincham et al., 2010 and Hannam et al., 2006). However, we also need to make sure that we do not over-animate social life and that we pay attention to both established and innovative methods beyond the social sciences which allow us to examine other histories, artistic and scientific practices (Merriman, 2013). It is equally important to recognise that, “[s]tillness, waiting, slowness and boredom may be just as important to many situations, practices and movements as sensations and experiences of speed, movement, excitement and exhilaration” when doing tourism mobilities research (Merriman, 2013, p. 16). Mobile methodologies add to our repertoire of techniques for gathering data rather than replacing existing ones, but help to bring alive our understanding of tourism mobilities (Adey, Bissell, Hannam, Merriman, & Sheller, 2013).