23 RELIGIOUS TOURISM / PILGRIMAGE STUDIES – Contributions by Noga Collins-Kreine
23 RELIGIOUS TOURISM / PILGRIMAGE STUDIES – Contributions by Noga Collins-Kreiner
My Academic Pilgrimage*
*A pilgrimage is a journey, often to an unknown or foreign place, taken by a person seeking new or expanded meaning about him or herself, others, nature, or a higher good. As such, it can lead to personal transformation.
My pilgrimage began 25 years ago, when I wrote my master’s thesis on Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. I chose this topic in order to follow in the footsteps of others in the field of tourism, but I also wanted to find my own path and to research what was then the still largely under-researched field of pilgrimage/religious tourism.
Over the past decade, I have deepened and broadened my primary areas of research and expertise. They now include pilgrimage studies, religious tourism, and religious geography; tourism development and the environment; mobilities of hiking and senior-citizen tourists; and a new focus: tourism in the Covid-19 era.
1) Pilgrimage Studies, Religious Tourism, and Religious Geography
Since completing my master’s thesis (1995) on Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, I have engaged in many research projects on pilgrimage, religious tourism, and the religious geography of sites, concepts, and religions. Inspired by these topics, I have also investigated heritage tourism, spiritual tourism, and World Heritage Sites. This field of research examines the sociopolitical contexts of various religious sites in Israel and their spatial ramifications for the sociopolitical and tourism discourse.
- I regard political context as an inseparable aspect of my research on this subject. With the support of an Israel Science Foundation grant, which I received to research “Spatial Deviation: The Establishment of New Religious Sites in Israel’s Landscape,” I authored a number of articles on the political aspects of religious sites in Israel (Collins-Kreiner, Shmueli and Ben-Gal, 2013; Shmueli, Collins-Kreiner and Ben-Gal, 2014; Ben-Gal, Collins-Kreiner and Shmueli, 2015; Collins-Kreiner, Shmueli and Ben-Gal, 2015). These articles were accepted for publication in leading geographical journals such as Cities and Applied Geography.
- Over the years, I have conducted numerous studies on phenomena of religious geography, pilgrimage, and religious tourism in Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism, and the Baha’i faith, both as a solo researcher and in collaboration with colleagues from Israel and abroad (Collins-Kreiner 2010a; 2010b; 2016). I have also supervised Ph.D. research on these topics, and I plan on conducting additional studies on other relevant sites, spaces, and concepts in the future.
- These articles, which have been accepted for publication in leading journals, include a current (Collins-Kreiner 2020) review paper submitted to a leading journal in the field. The paper, which sums up the last two decades of research on the topic of religion and tourism, is the first of seven papers included in the Annals of Tourism‘s “Cu