teaching: undergraduate: COM 322
Making place: Tourism, culture and global communication (Summer 08)
Course overview
This Exploration Seminar will help you understand some of the human consequences of globalization by studying the important role communication plays in tourism as a global cultural industry. Nowhere is this more apparent than Switzerland – the birth place of modern tourism and a country which embodies the challenges and successes of multilingualism, multi-culturalism and multinationalism. Since the 1850s, Switzerland and especially Interlaken (our base for the seminar) have organized and promoted themselves as the quintessential tourist destinations. In the face of global warming, European/EU politics, and international economics, this “production of place” is also being constantly revised. In June 2008, as co-host of the European Cup football (‘soccer’) tournament, Switzerland becomes yet again a major focus of cultural production.
Why tourism?
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)
Put simply, tourism is one of the hottest topics in contemporary, interdisciplinary scholarship. Put more complexly, tourism is the single largest international trade in the world and there is noone whose life remains unaffected by tourism – be it those people privileged enough to tour or people who are ‘toured’. In fact, social theorists argue that contemporary ‘travel for leisure’ does not merely reflect socio-economic relations within and between countries, but is instrumental in organizing these relations. And, in this case, the implications really are global.
Over the last twenty or thirty years, the academic study of tourism has been gathering a tremendous momentum, with some of the most important contributions being made by scholars from sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. Importantly, t he critical study of tourism distinguishes itself from business-school interest in Travel and Leisure Management by its focus on the cultural meanings and ideologies by which tourism is represented and organized, as well as the power relations which underpin host-tourist exchanges.
Under the rubric of "global communication," the goal of COM 322 is to introduce you to this cutting-edge field of scholarship but also to have them engage theoretically and critically with the study of tourism from a uniquely communicative perspective (e.g. in terms of language, visual culture and social interaction). In this regard, you will be asked to examine the particular ways that tourist identities, relationships and communities are represented and constituted in everyday, ordinary moments of human communication – whether in face-to-face or in mediatized contexts.
In undertaking a substantive schedule of reading and well as a series of first-hand fieldwork exercises, you will also come to see for yourself how travel for pleasure/leisure serves as a powerful channel and agent of globalization. Ultimately, we will explore together the complex ways in which tourism is deeply complicitous in the ideologies of global economics and (inter)cultural exchange.