Ashgate Publishing Blog

Jessica Jacobs’ book Sex, Tourism and the Postcolonial Encounter: Landscapes of Longing in Egypt was reviewed in last week’s Times Higher Education.

This is a lucid account of tourism and draws usefully upon postcolonial understandings of the historical-socio-economic web that exists between “the West and the Rest” to understand the intricate relationships between European women and Egyptian men. Jacobs offers a salutary reminder that the longing to “lose oneself” is always problematic and never neutral, and that the desire “to leave the hell of work to a paradise of leisure” is always freighted with historical-socio-cultural resonances.

Read the full review…

Jessica Jacobs is based at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Mike Robinson, one of the editors of The Framed World: Tourism, Tourists and Photography spoke on Radio 4′s January 13 episode of Thinking Allowed. You can listen again via the BBC website.

The book asks why tourists take photos of certain things and not of others? Why do tourists take photos at all? How do photos build places, how do they change and shape lives? An interdisciplinary team of contributors from across the globe explore such questions as they examine the relationships between photography and tourism and tourists.

‘Given the ubiquity of tourist photography, it is surprising that so little scholarly attention has been dedicated to this subject. The Framed World fills the gap. Like tourism itself, this volume travels the globe, with cases ranging from Taiwan and New Mexico to Greece and Indonesia, and spans the entire history of photography. A most welcome addition to the “new tourist studies”, thanks to the volume’s attention to photography as a social practice.’
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, author of Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage

‘Ranging from the methodological to the historical, via the anthropological and philosophical, this volume presents cross-disciplinary approaches with which to read off the many layers in the palimpsest of each tourist site considered. It presents a strong analysis of the particularly neglected area of tourists’ photographs, and the photography of tourism.’
Marcus Banks, University of Oxford, UK

‘The book consists of 14 essays intertwining a number of disciplines, from the most obvious ones of tourism studies and photography (both professional and amateur image-making), to anthropology, history, psychology, cultural studies, and even theology and music. It is the richness of the dialogue between these, combined with the ubiquity of the practices described, that makes the publication intriguing and accessible.’
The Times Higher Education

The Framed World: Tourism, Tourists and Photography, was reviewed in the Times Higher last week.

From the THE review:

The book consists of 14 essays intertwining a number of disciplines, from the most obvious ones of tourism studies and photography (both professional and amateur image-making), to anthropology, history, psychology, cultural studies, and even theology and music. It is the richness of the dialogue between these, combined with the ubiquity of the practices described, that makes the publication intriguing and accessible.

More…

Edited by Mike Robinson and David Picard, the book is published in Ashgate’s New Directions in Tourism Analysis series.

Other reviews:

Given the ubiquity of tourist photography, it is surprising that so little scholarly attention has been dedicated to this subject. The Framed World fills the gap. Like tourism itself, this volume travels the globe, with cases ranging from Taiwan and New Mexico to Greece and Indonesia, and spans the entire history of photography. A most welcome addition to the “new tourist studies”, thanks to the volume’s attention to photography as a social practice.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, author of Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage

Ranging from the methodological to the historical, via the anthropological and philosophical, this volume presents cross-disciplinary approaches with which to read off the many layers in the palimpsest of each tourist site considered. It presents a strong analysis of the particularly neglected area of tourists’ photographs, and the photography of tourism.
Marcus Banks, University of Oxford, UK

Visit the Ashgate website for more information on the titles we publish on Tourism.

One of the post popular titles from our Geography list this year has been Cultural Tourism and Sustainable Local Development, a collection of essays edited by Luigi Fusco Girard and Peter Nijkamp.

‘This book defines and illustrates this sustainability dilemma and provides policy options for both the development of heritage and cultural tourism and the management of the sustainability problem. It examines various approaches to the evaluation of such policy precepts and related practices. Several case studies provide detailed examples in a way that illustrates the themes of the book. This is a must read for all students of tourism and cultural/heritage driven economic development and planning.’
Roger R. Stough, George Mason University, USA

Continue reading ‘Cultural Tourism and Sustainable Local Development’