Shaping tourists’ wellbeing through guided slow adventures

Against the backdrop of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 3, good health and wellbeing, this paper reports on a study that examined how outdoor guides perceive their role in facilitating the psychological wellbeing of tourists who consume slow adventure experiences. These experiences, such as canoeing, stargazing or foraging, are characterised by a slower passage of time, immersion in the natural world and a sense of belonging to small social groups. Grounded in research on wellbeing from a positive psychology perspective, the study utilised semi-structured, in-depth, interviews with ten outdoor adventure guides in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Following a hermeneutic interpretive approach to analyse the interview transcripts, the findings revealed how perceptions of time, meaningful moments and a sense of togetherness are choreographed by slow adventure guides to shape tourists’ psychological wellbeing through immersive guided experiences, ultimately helping tourists to re-establish a much-yearned-for connection with nature. The study adds to tourism, wellbeing and sustainability literature by providing new perspectives on psychological wellbeing through guided slow adventures. In particular the findings contribute to positive tourism, or tourism and positive psychology field of research, by revealing how mindful and eudaimonic visitor experiences are organised by adventure tour guides in natural settings

Persuasion architectures: Consumer spaces, affective engineering and (criminal) harm

Drawing together recent theoretical work from both within and beyond criminology, this article considers the role of strategically designed consumer spaces in eliciting potentially criminogenic and harmful dispositions and behaviours. First, the article introduces recent work in cultural geography and urban studies, which has drawn attention to the manipulation of affect through spatial design. Second, by way of example, the article considers how such strategies are deployed in three types of consumer environments: shopping malls and retail spaces; casinos and other gambling environments; and the so-called night time economy. Third, the article engages such developments theoretically. It is suggested we rethink the distinctions and interrelationships between human subjectivity and agency and the built environment. The implications of this proposed conceptual reorientation are explored – first, for our understandings of agency, intentionality, moral responsibility and political accountability; and second, for criminological thinking around embodied difference, power and exclusio

'I'm not going to tell you cos you need to think about this': A conversation analysis study of managing advice resistance and supporting autonomy in undergraduate supervision

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in Postdigital Science and Education, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00194-5 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.This article firstly, critically analyses a face-to-face supervision meeting between an undergraduate and a supervisor, exploring how the supervisor handles the twin strategies of fostering autonomy while managing resistance to advice. Conversation Analysis is used as both a theory and a method, with a focus on the use of accounts to support or resist advice. The main contribution is the demonstration of how both the supervisor and student are jointly responsible for the negotiation of advice, which is recycled and calibrated in response to the student’s resistance. The supervisor defuses complaints by normalising them, and moving his student on to practical solutions, often with humour. He lists his student’s achievements as the foundation on which she can assert agency and build the actions he recommends. Supervisor-student relationships are investigated through the lens of the affective dimensions of learning, to explore how caring or empathy may serve to reduce resistance and make advice more palatable. By juxtaposing physically present supervision with digitally-mediated encounters, while acknowledging their mutual entanglement, the postdigital debate is furthered. In the context of Covid-19, and rapid decisions by universities to bring in digital platforms to capture student-teacher interactions, the analysis presented is in itself an act of resistance against the technical control systems of the academy and algorithmic capitalism

‘Sport qua science’: Michel Serres’ ball as an asset of knowledge

This article concerns the use of sport as an asset of knowledge in academia. The background to this is sport’s neglected role and isolation in academia, save for in sundry sports sciences. By mapping the academic use of philosopher Michel Serres’ sport metaphors, a new perspective of the relationship between sport and science is explored. A mixed-methods approach was chosen to review the literature using Serres’ concept of the ‘quasi-object’. The findings show that the concept appeals to a wide array of disciplines within the social sciences and the humanities. The article suggests that there exists a parallel sport science in academia that flies under the radar of regular sport disciplines, a sort of ‘sport AS humanities’. This proposed ‘sportive science’ focuses on other aspects of sport than its already existing sport study counterparts. Thus, sport qua science acknowledges its topic as an asset of knowledge, not as a mirror of society. © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor &amp; Francis Group.</p