teaching: undergraduate: COM 210
The Tourist Gaze: Understanding Global Communication (Autumn 2008)
Contemporary tourism involves travel, however temporary and fleeting, by Western peoples on a massive scale to the margins of empire and to the peripheries of modernity; it is one of the greatest population movements of all time. (Bruner, 2005: 10)
Signalling new freedom for some, globalizing processes appear as uninvited and cruel fate for many others. Freedom to move, a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, quickly becomes the main stratifying factors of our times. … (Bauman, 1998: 2)
Whatever the destination of their passengers, globalism and the pursuit of global capital is the driving force behind inflight magazines and the promotion of most international travel and tourism. Globalization is, in effect, a sales pitch, and the ‘global citizen’ is both role-model and myth which, in the service of global capital, are designed to persuade us to spend and consume. … Globalization is, therefore, not just economic reordering, it is also a lifestyle and a marketing brand to be bought into and sold. As such, it is both cultural discourse and identity resource. (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2003: 601-02)
Background
Human mobility is a hallmark of globalization: in the form of enforced migration for economic or political reasons, or in the form of tourism for leisure and pleasure. Without doubt, people are criss-crossing the globe more than ever before. Tourism alone is the single largest international trade in the world. There is no-one whose life is unaffected by tourism; either you are privileged enough to tour or you are someone who is “toured.” For many people, it’s a mixture of both. Either way, tourism is often responsible for creating and sustaining major local and global inequalities. For some communities, globalization gives rise to more and more opportunities for travel, for others it merely generates greater obstacles. And it not just a question of money. Tourism relies heavily on communication and entails the constant flow of ideas, words, images, values, and beliefs. In fact, it is this which makes tourism more of a cultural and communicative industry than an economic one.
As a way to explore the human consequences and communicative implications of globalization, this discovery seminar offers you a unique chance to study the role language, visual imagery, and social interaction play in tourism as a truly global cultural industry. You will be invited to experience first-hand what everyday, local tourism practices tell us about the macro-level changes being brought about by globalization. In particular, you will get to see how this is actually happening right here in our own back yard.
Organization
The Discovery Seminar (see link left) arises from Professor Thurlow's interdisciplinary research on tourism discourse and will invite you to conduct your own investigations into the fascinating relationship between communication, tourism and globalization. You will be asked, for example, to consider the different ways tourism can perpetuate social inequalities and class distinctions (e.g., by privileging certain visions of Seattle over other, more marginalized visions). This will be an introductory, hands-on approach to academic reading, writing, and fieldwork research that’s personal and familiar. It will also be based on collaborative research and raise your awareness about local and global issues. Some of the specific learning activities and outcomes of the seminar will be:
- working through a variety of scholarly texts in the field carefully selected to introduce students to different levels of academic writing/reading;
- undertaking their own literature search to develop basic academic skills such as using the library and conducting online searches;
- conducting a series of small, hands-on projects to introduce them to key research skills and analytic concepts;
- developing a range of critical skills for thinking about the role of communication in everyday, local life and in terms of global, economic life.