76 TOURISM AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN FRANCE AND INDONESIA – Contributions b
76 TOURISM AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN FRANCE AND INDONESIA – Contributions by Sylvine Pickel-Chevalier
Becoming an associate professor at the age of 29 signified, for me, the blossoming of a professional dream that had been born 15 years earlier, when I was only 14 years old. I had discovered a passion for studies, for the daily intellectual enrichment that they afforded me, and at that early age, already decided to devote myself to a life in their pursuit, as professor and researcher. My personal itinerary – my Parisian parents’move to the isle of Oleron, a place much affected by the development of tourism, when I was but seven years old- introduced me at a very young age to its societal dynamics, born of the relationship established between ‘outsiders’ and the local population. Within the former category were those, like my parents, who began as vacationers and then went on to themselves invest in the tourism business. And I learned much about the local people, growing up around them as I did. Thus, at a very tender age I began to develop a sensitivity toward the complexity of such relationships, and how they bred a twofold process in which local cultures are both eroded and re-valorised, as they are redefined through the gaze and the expectations of tourists.
From these early experiences, I developed a particular sensitivity to tourism’s interaction with the environment. From the start of my Master’s studies, the theme which was to become the center of my interests and reflections began to take shape: tourism as a complex agent in our appreciation of the environment, in dialogue with the notion of « sustainability ». My trajectory had in fact been marked by the emergence of this concept in the decade of the 1990s, and by the way it soon became a bearer of new challenges, confronting scientists with an abundance of new questions and generating their critical analyses ( Wall, 1993 ; Cater, 1993; Hunter, 1997; Mowforth et Munt, 1998, Butler, 1999 ; Liu 2003; Buckley, 2012, etc.). I completed a pluridisciplinary DEA[1] in ETES (Environment, Time, Space, Society, concentration in Management of Biodiversity and Sustainable Development) in 2004 with the defence of a PhD in geography that received honourable mention from my examiners. It was entitled “Representations and practice of nature at French Atlantic tourism resorts. An evolving social construction” at the University of Paris VII Denis Diderot.
My scientific thought has since its inception been shaped as geographical analysis that takes its impulse from international and interdisciplinary fields of theory and research. These fields of interlocution have enabled me to deepen my analytical work on tourism, leisure, the environment and sustainable development, and to expand it through incursions into other themes and territories. Within this context, I have built my research around two major pillars:
- The processes of co-constitution of tourism, “nature” and the environment, in conjunction w