Travelography #44: Thai Coup Impacts, China - US Travel, & Travel with Skype

(click on the title above to go to the PCN TRAVELOGRAPHY web page)

The coup in Thailand is impacting tourist arrivals, but hopes are high that a new government will have more success in dealing with Muslim rebel attacks in southern Thailand that killed a Canadian tourist last week. More Chinese want to come to the US and four US airlines vie for a coveted new route between the US and China. And Skype goes shopping for a travel industry partner.

Click on the title above to go to the PCN website for links to these stories.

Click Here for the .MP3 File

G4T #41: Power, Politics and Tourism - Prof. C. Michael Hall

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Another Presentation from the Graduate Workshop on Researching Tourism in Asia, sponsored by the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, and the Dept. of Tourism at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

Today's presentation by Prof. C. Michael Hall of the University of Otago, New Zealand (cmhall@business.otago.ac.nz). The title is:

Studying the Political in Tourism: Ethics, Issues, Methods and Practicalities

Here is the original abstract from the workshop:

Issues of politics and policy are widely regarded as a significant factor in tourism. However, the number of studies that examine such issues remain small in relation to the supposed importance of tourism policy and politics. The presentation will arguethat this situation exists because of the very nature of what such studies entail, i.e. examining issues of power, and therefore this may create substantial stresses in terms of the relationship of the researcher to their subjects and the institutional environment within which they operate. The presentation will discuss issues of method in examining tourism policy and politics and examine the practical dimensions of undertaking research that arise from different methods that are adopted and the aims and objectives of studies. Emphasis in placed on the importance of being aware of intended audiences for such research as well as the potential effects of such studies on research subjects, participants and other stakeholders, including the researcher. Key issues include the relative implications of prescriptive and descriptive approaches to policy analysis; describing power; and implications of scale of analysis. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of ethical considerations in conducting research on political issues in tourism and the importance of the development of policy arguments as a practical consequence of such research.
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Michael Hall is Professor and Head of the Department of Tourism, University of Otago, Dunedin and Docent, Department of Geography, University of Oulu, Finland. He is the co-editor of Current Issues in Tourism and has published widely on issues of tourism, regional development and environmental history including three books on tourism policy and politics.

Released under a Creative Commons Copyright - noncommercial, attribution, share-alike.

G4T #40: Defining Modernity in Asia (graduate research workshop)

(click on the title above to download the .mp3 file)

This week's Geography for Travelers podcast starts a series of recordings that I will be doing that come out of a couple of meetings that I attended in Singapore last week. The first was a graduate student workshop about doing research in Asia. I was one of four keynote speakers at that workshop, and today's podcast is an edited recording of my talk. The title was "Defining and Redefining Modernity in New Asia." Not exactly tourism, but closely related. The sound quality of the recording was not ideal, but I think I edited it to a level that can still be listened to. Let me know if I am wrong.

The second meeting was a three-day conference on Asian tourism in Asia. I hope to put presentations by other people from both meetings up over the next couple of months, along with some soundseeing audio. Both meetings were sponsored by the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.

Here is the abstract of my presentation from the Workshop program:

I will discuss the issue of meaning of modern and traditional in contemporary Asia, with a focus on the East and Southeast Asia. In my 30 years of living and studying in Asia, the contradictions between the modern and the traditional in these societies (especially in the built landscape) have always been of particular interest. I will present some theoretical perspectives on this topic, and my own opinions. This will, hopefully, lead to a discussion of the challenges of researching modernization in Asia.