Tourism communities and social ties: the role of online and offline tourist social networks in building social capital and sustainable practice.

Mobile connectivity enables the adoption of new ways to connect with social networks which are changing how we might, and could, seek support. In the tourism domain we increasingly blend online and offline presence to engage with social networks in the spatial location, at a distance and across time. This paper explores the forms of community that exist in physical tourism contexts, contexts not previously analysed through a community lens, and explores how mobile technology is creating connections within and beyond existing social networks. It examines how sustainable tourism can be enhanced by mobile connectivity through new space-time practices and using ephemeral interpersonal relationships to harness niche groups to create bottom-up social systems interested in sharing experiences, ideas and resources. Special attention is given to the concept of gelling socialities which proposes a less ridged network structure, and to the need to understand the increasingly liquid social dynamics of mobile social interactions. The paper adds to the theories surrounding community, social ties and tourism’s value to society. It draws on data from in-depth interviews undertaken while designing and testing a collaborative travel app. It contributes to growing research into the new technologies increasingly available for sustainable tourism marketing and implementation

Complex Knowing: Promoting Response-Ability Within Music and Science Teacher Education

There are significant pressures within UK Initial Teacher Education (ITE) to maintain and reproduce notions of knowledge as fixed, universal and therefore ‘bankable’ through transfer or transmission. Such views, as embedded in educational structures, separate teachers from learners and learners from contexts. An interesting subset of this trend is the case of music and science education, both of which share in a tradition of materialist practice, where knowledge-making derives from the use of ‘instruments’. A representational view of knowledge in these subjects has historically privileged tradition, canon, and reification in music, while emphasising facts and theories as separate from values in science. While these representational views of knowledge have been contested by feminist theory, materialism, and complexity theory, there remain significant challenges in developing music and science student teachers who are response-able to a view of knowing as active, dynamic, emergent and entangled. This chapter explores the use of sensory learning tools and activities with two groups of music and science student teachers. Thinking with Donna Haraway (Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Duke University Press, New York, 2016), we engage with the ‘trouble’ that such tools and activities create, both in terms of the students’ learning, the lecturers’ positioning and the socio-political contexts of such trouble within ITE

Mobility hub or hollow? : cross-border travelling in the Mediterranean, 1995–2016

First published online: 23 July 2019The Mediterranean is often portrayed as a hub of human mobility. In this article, we test this widespread view by exploring the structure of travel flows in the region over the last two decades (1995–2016). We find that mobility is much higher and increasing more strongly along the northern than along the southern shore, thus creating a growing mobility divide. South–north and north–south movements are even scarcer and stagnate or even decline over time. With a Gini coefficient of .87, mobility flows are distributed extremely unequally across country pairs in the Mediterranean. Community detection algorithms reconfirm that mobility predominantly takes place in disparate clusters around the Mediterranean, not across it. These findings imply that a ‘neo-Braudelian’ view of the Mediterranean as a mobility hub is less justified than a ‘Rio Grande’ perspective that conceives of the Mediterranean as a mobility hollow. Multivariate regression models for network data suggest that geographical distance and, to a lesser extent, political visa regulations, explain the unequal mobility structure better than differences in economic well-being

Rhythmanalysing the coach tour: the Ring of Kerry, Ireland

This paper utilises and extends Henri Lefebvre's ideas about rhythmanalysis to explore the rhythmic qualities of taking a coach tour. The paper investigates the Ring of Kerry tour in the West of Ireland and reveals both the reproduction and disturbance, through itinerary and narratives of the coach drivers, of anticipated discourses and visual indexes of commodified Irishness. Central to the paper is the ordering of different rhythmic assemblages, which connect and disconnect in multiple ways. It is argued that the rhythmic multiplicity of coach tours involve entanglements of embodiment, affective registers, technologies and materialities. The paper reveals how the myriad tempos and rhythms of the tour take on different consistencies and intensities at different stages of the journey, and investigates the capacities of these rhythms to affect and be affected by the pulse of the spaces moved through and stopped at. In so doing, a supplemented rhythmanalysis is suggested as a productive approach for apprehending tourist spaces, practices and landscapes