Strangers in the night: nightlife studies and new urban tourism

This paper draws together recent scholarship from the study of urban tourism and nightlife. Though studies of urban tourism do not always specifically address nightlife, and likewise studies of the night and nightlife do not always examine tourism, both bodies of research overlap in important ways. Concerns about commercialisation, gentrification, displacement, and urban change are to be found in both bodies of research. However, while the study of urban tourism typically recognises the erasure of the host / guest binary and seeks to destabilise the notion of who is a tourist or stranger, studies of nightlife often rest on a much clearer distinction between who belongs and who does not. An argument proposed here is that while the host / guest, tourist / non-tourist binary is perhaps reconfiguring, the night and nightlife spaces reinstate these binaries in various ways. This paper thinks through debates about tourists and residents in the night, focusing in particular on questions of belonging, place identification and gentrification through night-time uses

Exploring veganism through serious leisure and liquid modernity

Understandings of leisure have progressed into a deep comprehension of the importance of intrinsic qualities that leisure creates for an individual choice and expression of self through food support the ‘modern’ paramount of personal choice and individuality. Food and dietary choices connecting to leisure and lifestyle mirror the conceptual framework of liquid modernity. The clarification of lifestyle offers an approach to explore veganism as a leisure lifestyle providing the foundation for this paper where veganism is explored using the dimensions of serious leisure. In this exploratory paper, the serious leisure perspective will be critiqued as a framework to explore veganism, as it moves from a diet and lifestyle to a form of individual expression of identity and self, culture and leisure