63 SITUATING TOURISM – Contributions by Heather Mair
63 SITUATING TOURISM – Contributions by Heather Mair
With degrees in political science, political economy and, finally, rural development, I didn’t start my career with a deep background in tourism studies. After a few years ‘out’ of the academic world (i.e., I took a break between graduate degrees), I returned to doctoral studies with a deep desire to understand rural development. I quickly learned that, in the early 2000s, understanding rural development meant you had to also develop an understanding of tourism. Indeed, as a young scholar asking questions about rural development, it became clear that, at least in the Canadian context, part of the policy response (the answer, if you will) to questions and concerns about generating opportunities for rural development always seemed to include some discussion of tourism. Having had my own extensive and sometimes deeply uncomfortable experiences with tourism around the world, I wanted to uncover the reasons for this situation.
As a result, the key contributions my work has made to the study of tourism have included an effort to critically evaluate tourism development as a component of our contemporary political economy – what I think of as ‘situating tourism’. That is, nearly all my tourism-related projects have involved efforts to ground an understanding of tourism and tourism development within ‘bigger’ contextual issues of political economy and the working of late capitalism. This effort to situate tourism was guided by two foundational questions: (1) why tourism? and (2) how tourism?
Why tourism?
From 2000 to 2009, I published, alone and with colleagues, a series of papers, book chapters and a book that all, in some way, sought to trouble what I viewed to be an often-unasked question: why tourism? I wanted to challenge what I thought were almost pre-given assumptions about the role that tourism could (or should) play in helping small economies reverse the sometimes devastating trends of population decline, deindustrialisation, economic restructuring, and a decrease in natural resources-based development. I asked: what was it about tourism that made it so attractive as an option for stimulating economic growth? Because tourism development is based on entrepreneurialism and often centered on notions of community self-expression, independence, and celebration, it was a kind of low investment, feel-good response to the daunting challenges of economic change that many communities in Canada (and around the world) were facing.
Influenced by critical geographers such as Britton (1991), and planners such as Marcouiller (1997), I saw the value of situating analyses of tourism development within the broader context of neoliberal governing rationality and used critical policy analysis and regulation theory (Aglietta, 1979; Goodwin, Cloke, & Milbourne, 1995, Lipietz, 1987) to illustrate tourism’s growing appeal as a development strategy over 25 years (1975-2000). This assessment of tourism policy evolution l