Coleridge: A computer tool for assisting musical reflection and self‐explanation

This paper examines some of the problems involved when learning how to compose music. A prototype computer‐based music tool called Coleridge is described. Coleridge was used in a study that investigated the dialogues that took place when a mentor attempted to encourage creative reflection in students. Results of dialogue analysis suggested that because learners seem unable to make accurate predictions about how a musical phrase will sound, there is a real need for a computer‐based learning assistant. Finally, the paper reports on how these findings were used to motivate the design of a mentor's assistant in a new version of Coleridge

Ten Years of Critical Tourism Studies: Reflections on the Road Less Traveled

This introduction to the Special Issue describes and reviews the development of the Critical Tourism Studies Network and its unfolding values-led humanist and transformative perspective. It defines its philosophical roots and its inquiry–learning–action nexus, before briefly outlining the evolution and trajectory of tourism studies as a field of inquiry to provide context for the critical turn. The introduction concludes by summarizing the approaches and methodologies employed in the six articles of the collection, all of which provide both insights into the current state of critical tourism studies and glimpses of some of the challenges that lie ahead for the field of tourism studies

Gender, Advertising and Ethics: Marketing Cuba

Online advertisements are representations of ethnographic knowledge and sites of cultural production, social interaction and individual experience. Based on a critical discourse analysis of an online Iberia Airlines advertisement and a series of blogs, this paper reveals how the myths and fantasies privileged within the discourses of the advertising and travel industries entwine to exoticise and eroticise Cuba. The paper analyses how constructions of Cuba are framed by its colonial past, merging the feminine and the exotic in a soft primitivism. Tourism is Cuba’s largest foreign exchange earner and a significant link between the island and the global capitalist system. These colonial descriptions of Cuba create a rhetoric of desire that entangles Cuba and its women in a discourse of beauty, conquest and domination and have actual consequences for tourism workers and dream economies, in this case reinforcing the oppression of Afro-Cuban women by stereotyping and objectifying them

Tourism’s lost leaders: Analysing gender and performance

Higher education is increasingly engaged with diversity initiatives, especially those focused on women in academic leadership, whilst there is an evolving literature across the humanities and the social, management and natural sciences, critiquing academia’s gendered hierarchies. In contrast, senior academics in the field of tourism management have largely eluded similar sustained analysis. This paper builds on recent gender-aware studies of tourism’s leading academics with three aims. Firstly, to widen evidence of gendering in tourism’s academic leadership by scrutinizing and contextualizing performance indicators, which make and mark its leaders and shape its knowledge canon. Secondly, since critique alone cannot lead to transformation, the paper seeks to ‘undo’ gender in tourism’s academy. Thirdly the paper presents interventions to accelerate academic gender equity

Communicating Paradox: Uncertainty and the Northern Lights

While many characteristics of tourism products are well known, relatively little work has explored elements of uncertainty and risk. Little is known about how tourism operators communicate aspects of uncertainty. This qualitative study uses content analysis to explore the language used in promotional material of tour operators and destination management organisations to communicate the unpredictable nature of northern lights. The study involves two Norwegian destinations (2004-2014). Three rhetorical strategies are identified: first, the rhetoric of technology, enhanced mobility, and adding additional activities; secondly, through ‘hiding’ or obscuring the uncertainty; and thirdly, through employing culturally and geographically appropriate metaphors (i.e. ‘hunt’) to embrace the element of uncertainty. This study advances our understanding of how tourism operators rhetorically address temporally and/or spatially uncertain attractions by demonstrating how the operators negotiate and minimise uncertainty through the narrative of ‘the hunt’. This rhetoric implies that uncertainty can enhance value in a touristic experience

Understanding older women\u27s leisure: The value of biographical research methods

The phenomenal growth in the number of older people in the western world is well documented, with the fastest growing group being those aged over 80 years, the majority of whom are women. Despite this demographic transformation, little research has sought to understand the meaning of tourism and leisure both for older people in general and specifically for women in the \u27oldest old\u27 phase. The research that does exist is typically quantitative and provides an essentialist view of leisure in old age, often failing to recognise the diversity of older people\u27s experiences. In contrast, this paper aims to provide a more fine-grained discussion of older people\u27s leisure. Drawn from the first author\u27s doctoral study, it reports and considers a biographical interview with a seventy-nine year old woman in order to provide insight into how a person\u27s history and the cultural, social and historical contexts of their life can determine their life choices. We conclude that it is not possible to study older people\u27s leisure behaviour through \u27snapshot\u27 research (which isolates one moment in time); instead if we are to more fully understand how their leisure and tourism experiences are constructed, we must try to engage with the context from which those experiences emerged

Conceptualising On-Screen Tourism Destination Development

This paper integrates cultural theory and marketing strategy to examine the complex relationship between on-screen popular culture and tourism destination place-making. Its review of the literature results in the development of an inter-disciplinary conceptual framework (termed ‘on-screen dollying’) that provides a culturally-grounded and contextually-driven theorisation of the means by which on-screen popular culture place-making can foster destination development. In developing the conceptual framework, the paper classifies the characteristics of on-screen tourism affecting destination development and identifies six strategies for leveraging on-screen tourism. Based on our inter-disciplinary analysis, we propose a research agenda that integrates on-screen tourism and destination place-making and which has implications for policy and theory