Critical Theories of Travel and Landscape

This project investigates the relationship between tourism, place and landscape. In the past decade tourism studies has broken out of its traditional institutional affiliation with business and management programs to take its legitimate place as an interdisciplinary social science field of cutting-edge scholarship. The field has emerged as central to ongoing debates in social theory concerning such diverse topics as postcolonialism, mobility, and post-modernism.
While there has been a diverse body of empirical research on this transformation, the theoretical discussions in tourism studies remain largely attached to theories of modernity and Anglocentric assumptions about tourism. This project, engaging directly with what tourism does in practice and in place, intends to demonstrate the need for theoretical interventions that will move tourism scholarship beyond the province of tourism studies. The project will reframe theoretical discussions around “real practices” in relations to the grand narratives of modernity and all assumptions about landscape, authenticity, identity, community, tradition, and development.