The complexities of religious tourism motivations: sacred places, vows and visions

The aim of this paper is to understand the complexity of travel motivations to sacred places. Using ethnographic techniques within the Greek Orthodox context, we argue that while motivations are institutionally constructed, they are fragile, dynamic and progressive; being embedded within everyday performances of religion. This calls into question the fixed centeredness and predetermined sacredness of religious sites. Travel motivations become directly influenced by believers’ intimate and emergent performances not only of places but also of religion itself; the meaning of places being based on lived experiences of doing religion and interacting with the sacred, as exemplified in vows and visions. Such understandings are crucial in predicting the effects of failing pilgrimages and the processes of authentication of places, which can help explain visitation patterns

Religiousness as tourist performances: a case study of Greek Orthodox pilgrimage

The aim of this paper is to decipher ways of experiencing religiousness through tourist performances, intersecting textual approaches with the essential embodiment and materiality of the tourist world. Exploring the diversity of religious tourists’ practices within the Greek Orthodox context, two dimensions underpinning religious tourist experience are highlighted: institutional performances and unconventional performances. Focussing on the embodied experience and drawing upon theories of performance, the paper critiques the interplays of body and place to re-conceptualise current understanding of the pilgrimage/tourism relationship. In doing so, the paper proposes that tourism and religion are not separate entities but linked through embodied notions of godliness sensed through touristic performances

BECOMING RESEARCHED: THE OPPORTUNITIES OF AUTOETHNOGRAPHY IN TOURISM RESEARCH

This paper explores the concept of ‘becoming researched’ through the opportunities for autoethnography as a technique of data collection. This research emerges from both authors’ PhD research experiences and explores the ways in which autoethnography mobilises an appreciation for the embodied, sensual and emotional experiences of tourist and research practice. As such, it proposes communication through inter-subjective negotiation and facilitates an enriched research space within which previously ‘hidden’ spaces emerge through stimulating creativity and deepening connection through mutual appreciation between researcher and participants

Gender and capacity building : a multi-layered study of empowerment

This study shifts the focus from building individual capacities to understanding the relational acts through which empowerment and education acquire their value and meaning. Conceptually, the paper employs social cognitive theory to explore the interplay between social learning, relational agency, and culture. This interplay builds the foundation for the development of an empowerment model of capacity building that proposes an interlinked system of community capacity and empowerment dimensions. The model is explored in the context of the Education for All project in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The research combines participant observation, qualitative interviews and visual methods to provide rich insights to situated knowledges of learning and empowerment. Findings reveal that the meaning of education equates to the capacity to aspire to a different life. This problematizes the way gender and gender relations are understood in the rural Berber villages. The girls’ education unsettles the repeating cycle of female educational deprivation, and leads them to become role models within their communities. This instills the image of educated women in community consciousness, leading to an incipient change in perceptions of what girls and women can be and do

Caring at a distance : a model of business care, trust and displaced responsibility

This paper advances an ethic of care for sustainable tourism. The study develops an original business care model that captures the dynamic interrelationships between care, responsibility and trust in corporate philanthropy. The model provides a novel perspective on how responsible business practices are formed across distance by shedding light on the different layers of responsibility and trust that characterize business–stakeholder relationships. The model is evaluated using the example of tour operators’ engagement in the Education for All project in Morocco. Findings show that tour operators’ commitment to caring at a distance becomes part of shared, displaced and performed articulations of responsibility. While performed responsibility acknowledges the embodiment of care, displaced responsibility shifts the responsibility to select, perform and/or oversee acts of care to stakeholders in destinations. Shared responsibility requires attention to the ways in which meanings and practices of care are co-constructed in corporate philanthropy with trust functioning as a central driver of these processes

The power of storytelling in social media

Tourists are increasingly connecting in online social networks (OSN) where they share content and coconstruct narratives of tourist destinations through their shared tourism experiences. The destinations give tourists a stage to act on where they perform a desirable self. Thus, their performances and performative acts reflect on how destinations are represented. This poses a challenge for destination management organisations (DMOs). They have to find ways to join the conversations of OSN users to influence perception of their destination. It is believed that DMOs ought to build alliances with tourists by empowering them to co-construct brand narratives and aligning their storytelling with DMOs’ preferred narratives. This research aims to assess the role of storytelling in mediating tourism experiences in order to identify ways for DMOs to build alliances to strengthen destination narratives. It examines a range of different storytellers and how they reinforce and undermine preferred narratives of DMOs, and how they might write different stories across different types of OSN due to their performativity. The practices and strategies DMOs adopt to strengthen storytelling in OSN are also examined

Mess and method: Using ANT in tourism research

The use of actor-network thinking is increasingly evident in tourism research. ANT offers the researcher a practical, fieldwork-based orientation, emphasising detailed description of relationships between actors in practice. However, questions which arise for the researcher in using ANT are seldom confronted in the literature. This paper contributes to the growing ANT literature in tourism by identifying five ‘character traits’ relating to selection and use of method in ANT research. It uses an empirical case study to show how these traits are performative in the researcher’s ‘hinterland’ of methodological choices, providing theoretical and practical reflections for future researchers. It ends by considering how acknowledging these traits in the account can demonstrate adherence to accepted criteria for research quality

Encountered space and situated lay-knowledge: A mixed methods approach

This research draws on the geographical concept of situated lay-knowledge to highlight how the formation of tourists’ attitudes to travel destinations challenges the theoretical foundation of theory of planned behaviour (TPB). It suggests that situated lay knowledge is dynamic as opposed to static which is the accepted basis of TPB and subsequently proposes ‘Situated Lay-Knowledge Travel Behaviour Model’ (SLKTB). The model was tested in a mixed methods approach where Chinese tourists, who knew little about Portugal, encountered Portuguese culture and cuisine in Macau. The overall results demonstrate that the formation of tourists’ attitudes about travel destinations is not pre-existing or static but dynamic and created from their ongoing encounters