Papers and Book Chapters by Felicity Picken
Abstract. The design of public space has gained importance as cities are increasingly positioned ... more Abstract. The design of public space has gained importance as cities are increasingly positioned in global flows of people, capital, and ideas. These spaces speak to the culture of a place as much as to the quality of its design, but the implementation of design as an inclusive process is fraught with difficulty. This is particularly pertinent in discussions about better ways of engaging people with urban design, where there is often a language barrier between those who specialise in spatial manipulation and the broader ‘society’ that uses this space. This paper gives an empirical account of how a spatial consciousness can be translated to society through an international design competition. The competition method of urban design relies upon promotion and ‘eventfulness’, both of which interpolate the public and contribute towards the generation of a deeper interest in the spatial imaginary of city planning. The creation of ‘urban design consumers’ through the visual consumption of the designs themselves offers an alternative way to gain public interest to the established traditions of public notices and formal public meetings. In this case, the competition extended the activity of urban designers beyond the mechanics of ‘space production’ to include ‘consumer production’ where a more intimate relationship between city planning and the people began to emerge.
Keywords: public spaces, urban design, competition, consumerism
Tourism Review International 18(3): 137-152
Many of Australia’s second homes are located in peripheral locations along the coast, away from s... more Many of Australia’s second homes are located in peripheral locations along the coast, away from suburbia and cities. Many of these areas have specific challenges relating to a declining or consolidating agricultural sector and the need to diversify economies in a climate of uncertainty. This offers
specific challenges for coastal local governments, who are often resource poor, managing transitional economies with unclear futures in terms of current and projected populations. This article begins with this broad landscape and focuses on two southeastern Victorian coastal areas that are known second home hotspots. Our article presents the findings of a residential survey conducted in Inverloch and Philip Island that specifically captured second home owners to discover who they are, why they have a second home in that area, what local area concerns they have, and what they intend to do with their second homes in the future. Within the limitations of our data, we find ambivalence among second home owners as a group, supporting the scholarship that identifies the difficulties of pinning this phenomenon down. That said, there are some discernible patterns among second home owners, particularly when they are put in contrast with the permanent residents of these communities.
Underpinning much of the literature surrounding lifestyle migration, counter-urbanisation and sec... more Underpinning much of the literature surrounding lifestyle migration, counter-urbanisation and second-home use is the question of motivations and future intentions. In this paper, we explore the characteristics and orientations for future use of land by second-home owners in two locales in Victoria Australia, Phillip Island and Inverloch. Using both qualitative and quantitative survey data we find that there are three areas of second-home governance which ought to be considered strongly for future planning in these areas, health, roads and infrastructure and climate change or sustainability. Using data from permanent residents and second-home owners from these areas in collaboration with demographic data, we argue that underlining these areas is a primary concern, that of ageing. However, while these issues burn brightly for both users of property in these places, the ability for the local government authorities to deal with them is limited because of a lack of resources.
Abstract:
Responding to John Urry’s call (in Climate Change and Society, 2011) to think about t... more Abstract:
Responding to John Urry’s call (in Climate Change and Society, 2011) to think about the implications of consumption and travel in the design of low carbon societies, this paper considers how the challenge to devise more localized forms of vacationing will impact Australian beach and beach cultures. Australian society is spatially concentrated on the coastal margins (75% live within 40kms of the coast and 25% live within 3kms), and yet, currently it is one of the highest consumers of vacationing based on flights to international locations, often to beach resorts. Current research on climate change and the beach is dominated by adaptation research, which models likely changes to geomorphology and built environments based on sea level rise. This has predicted an overall human retreat from the coast as a likely response; yet, this has not taken into account other important adaptations to climate change such as the localization of leisure and tourism. This paper argues that since Australians are unlikely to turn to their arid and agricultural interiors, it will be the coast that becomes a new and more intensive vacationing zone. Based on what we know of the previous era of mass beach
consumption in the mid-twentieth century and what we know about contemporary Australian tourism and tourists, this
paper identifies the likely dimensions and practices of beach cultures for a low-carbon Australia.
Keywords: Low Carbon Societies, Australian Beach and Coast, Localization of Vacationing, Tourism and Travel, Consumption
Across the world the impact of lifestyle or amenity migration on small country and coastal townsh... more Across the world the impact of lifestyle or amenity migration on small country and coastal townships has been a focal point for the social sciences. In this chapter, we examined coastal townships and regional places across the eastern coastline of Australia and the impact this migratory phenomenon has had on housing and development. Using statistical resources from a state government reporting authority, we analysed and tracked the changes in housing costs, both purchase and rental, since 2001. We also explored three different responses to development within towns that have grown significantly through this phenomenon which demonstrates that at times communities fight vehemently to protect their ‘sense of place’ through collective action. However, not all responses seek protection from lifestyle migrants and development. As this chapter shows, the division between those who have migrated to the place and local residents can sometimes spill over into public conflict over the destiny of the township. This is pointed directly at the notion to ‘protect from’ or ‘allow’ development to expand the boundaries of towns. From this perspective, the question of ‘authenticity’ that is embedded in different group perceptions becomes an ideal contest between groups and one that suggests that lifestyle migration is an inherently complex phenomenon.
Abstract
At first glance, the terms heritage and climate change appear to travel in opposite dir... more Abstract
At first glance, the terms heritage and climate change appear to travel in opposite directions. Heritage is concerned with conserving the past, while climate change is about conserving the future. This situation is further complicated with the spatial deviation that underwater heritage represents. This paper tackles this temporal and spatial cross roads by examining a tourist attraction that transforms modern, consumer culture into heritage in the form of a fast-tracked lost civilisation beneath the sea. MUSA is a sunken sculpture museum in the Caribbean Sea that inaugurates a unique way of restoring the distressed habitats of the Meso-American Reef System, while offering a sobering glimpse into a world that asks tourists to consider ‘what have we done?’ Visitors are invited to examine their own way of life as both precarious and implicated in climate changed futures by confronting them with an Atlantis-like eeriness that both reflects and portends the closure of the tumultuous Anthropocene. The experience promotes the immediacy of the present by concretising life-sized caricatures of consumer culture beneath the sea, bequeathing these to an aquatic environment that soon transforms them into a state of decaying modernity. This promotes a theatre for radical change as these caricatures, and by extension we, are overtaken by this environment and destined to a diminutive state.
Key Words
Tourism, Heritage, Anthropocene, Climate Change, Museum
Urban Research & Practice
Despite the growth of domestic and international markets in second homes, there has been relative... more Despite the growth of domestic and international markets in second homes, there has been relatively little research on this issue in the Australian context. Yet several features of this context present interesting ways of extending the debates about second home ownership that have characterised social and policy discussions to date in the UK and Europe. In this paper we consider the overall extent, regional distribution and broader impacts of a form of second home ownership that has risen rapidly and which is facilitated by a range of fiscal and macro-economic settings. We present the results of two national surveys that asked about the ownership of holiday homes and which reveal extensive ownership across a range of social groups. We then move to a discussion of a case study in the island state of Tasmania and to the growing commodification of its holiday ‘shack’ market to add depth to discussions about the localised ramifications of second home ownership. We conclude by discussing our results in the context of the international literature and by considering the public policy issues that our data raise.
Western beliefs about reality are steeped in the idea of a single, pure or true reality that can ... more Western beliefs about reality are steeped in the idea of a single, pure or true reality that can be isolated from various substitute realities. Representations are early examples of these substitutions, fuelling skepticism towards art and photography (Kardaun, 2000; Jay, 1993) as well as tourism – a producer of contrived experiences and staged encounters. As a copyist par excellence, tourism creates these (falser) experiences of reality through technologies including photography and art, theme parks, museums and interpretation centres, and with tactics like miniaturisation, façadia and scripting (Cohen, 1988; Urry, 2002; Urry and Larson, 2011). The tourist gaze (Urry, 1990) itself follows Foucault’s (1976) conceptualisation of the gaze as a technology that represents the world in a selective and particular way. In producing a partial view of reality, the creative potential of these technologies and strategies are often by-passed in favour of the dominant interpretation that, in representing reality, tourism routinely debases it (Deleuze and Kraus, 1983, p.183). This distinction between reality and representation is traced to Plato’s ideal forms and a long anxiety about what is “really real” that is evident through Descartes’ meditations and in the epistemological sovereignty of modern science (Latour, 1999).
While this “model of reality” (Deleuze and Kraus, 1983) is particularly active in tourism scholarship, it is rarely made explicit. Instead, tourism is often implicitly tarnished insofar as it is receptive to the superficial, what MacCannell (1976) refers to as staged authenticity, where tourists are trapped in a ‘circular structure of reference’ (Van den Abbeele, 1980, p.9) and plagued by an industry described as deceptive (Turner, 1976 cited in Crick, 1989, p.306) and devious (Taylor, 2001, p.8). Since Plato, the nobler task has resided in the ability to distinguish essence from appearance, the original from the copy and the true from false reality (Caillois, 1984; Deleuze and Kraus, 1983; Golden, 1975). On the basis of this assumption the pilgrim, the traveller and the ethnographer have been well distinguished from tourists (Stronza, 2001; Bruner, 1989; 1994), as tourist sites are distinguishable from real ones.
Oceanic estates are increasingly involved in the development of undersea tourism and leisure. Enc... more Oceanic estates are increasingly involved in the development of undersea tourism and leisure. Encountering undersea for pleasurable experiences is becoming big business as tourism and blue economies combine in these novel ways. As this size-able territory is opened up and transformed into diverse undersea experiences, equally important theoretical opportunities begin to emerge for tourism scholarship. This paper begins to explore the dimensions of this industry through some the most innovative undersea attractions to reveal the theoretical promises of blue tourism. The benefits and challenges these encounters do not only accrue to tourists and the tourism industry but also to the development of tourism knowledge. While understanding the production and consumption of blue tourism is valuable for the sustainable management of oceanic estates, this paper advocates the latent possibilities of undersea to counter the territorial bias that dominates tourism theory, limiting an appreciation of the role of all kinds of actors.
Abstract. It has been two decades since Haraway spoke about the ‘promise of monsters’, and sevent... more Abstract. It has been two decades since Haraway spoke about the ‘promise of monsters’, and seventy years since a novel kind of sea monster was created through the Aqua-Lung, giving ‘underwater worlds’ better access to humans. By revisiting and examining the combinatory effects of these historical moments, this paper illustrates the ‘promise of scuba divers’ who are somewhat monstrous in their potential to disturb common ideas about being human and life on land. In exchanging ‘sacred ground’ for submersion beneath the sea, scuba diving redefines the limits of human experience and emphasises the historical and largely forgotten primacy of land-based coordinates in theorising human life. Under the sea, these coordinates are vastly altered so that even preconscious markers, like breathing, are transformed through a circuitry that includes humans, science, technology, and nature in a ‘body-incorporate’. ‘Immersion’ becomes a threshold beyond which humans and nature, society and space are discovered anew in the reversal of the significance of territory to planetary life.
Keywords: posthuman, ocean, technology, experience, space
Academic publishing houses tend to be in the business of words not images, but is this any reason... more Academic publishing houses tend to be in the business of words not images, but is this any reason for tourism scholars to be remiss about photographs themselves? It is a curious fact that very few
tourist photographs are included in tourism research despite the importance of the claims that are built upon them. One of these is that cultural dupes are made from tourist photography – that
their photographic practices cast them as such – but the duping process is far from convincing or satisfactory particularly in the absence of the photographs themselves. This article tracks down
the missing tourist photographs by following the material relations that constitute the duping process and the remarkable, immaterial life of the tourist photograph as a resource for tourism scholarship. Once rediscovered, these photographs can be redeployed and increasingly are deployed in digital forms of materialism that are comparatively flexible, public and mobile. This new material configuration simultaneously casts the cultural dupe as an artefact of the analogue age and this invites examination of the power of digital contexts to trouble existing assumptions.
Stengers’ use of the ‘idiot’ can be fruitfully employed to demonstrate a tourist who misbehaves in new technological freedoms, and challenges existing scholarly interpretations and frameworks.
Tourist Studies
This paper explores the kind of stories non-humans enable us to tell about tourism. It introduces... more This paper explores the kind of stories non-humans enable us to tell about tourism. It introduces a ‘relational materialist’ approach to investigate tourism through the early life of a building called Zero Davey. In providing upmarket hotel accommodation, Zero Davey imported tourism into a place that is well established as the postcard image of Hobart, Australia’s southern-most city. In adding tourism stock to the Sullivans Cove precinct, Zero Davey acted as an importation device for tourism; however, this was only the first story. The building also delivered a controversy among ‘the people’ who deemed its appearance to be ‘out of keeping’ with Sullivans Cove. While this began to mirror a fairly common dialogue between ‘hosts and guests’, neither the provision of tourist accommodation nor the architecture of the building held any significance to the importation logistics or planning approval for Zero Davey. Instead, this was founded on the building’s ability to respond to a more expert reading of Sullivans Cove and another set of norms associated with ‘geological and urban integrity’. Consequently, there were three ‘buildings’ and no final ‘body’ who could arbitrate or adequately explain Zero Davey because the tourism object, the object of controversy and the object of design were not related to each other except through the building itself. Beginning with this claim gives Zero Davey an interest in the events of its own controversy, a role in its own design and a portion of the explanation for how tourism happens.
Tourism, like most social phenomena has tended to be studied and measured in terms of the intenti... more Tourism, like most social phenomena has tended to be studied and measured in terms of the intentions, meanings and actions of people. ‘Humanist tourism theory’ (Franklin 2003) is the norm and not until recently has there been any inclination to question this. This research begins by asking what tourism is when it is not assumed to be ‘a purely human accomplishment’ (after Haldrup and Larsen 2006) but when emphasis is given instead to the hybrid nature of social phenomena that is ‘teeming with things’ (Franklin 2003: 98). Using a ‘symmetrical’ (Serres 1991/1997) approach, it is claimed that tourism is a performance that includes humans and non-humans and this means some of the actors, according to human design, intention or understanding, are variously ‘indifferent’ to what they are supposed or meant to be (after Latour 1997a). This indifference retains a potential to ‘misbehave’ and then profoundly challenge humanist tourism theory so that when they intervene there is no longer ‘reliable tourism theory’. Instead with a more inclusive list of actors ‘tourism as an ordering’ (Franklin 2004) begins to emerge and this research presents an ethnographic study of how this happens in a well-visited place called Sullivans Cove in Hobart, Australia. The Urban Design Framework is one of the most intentional statements about the rebuilding and design of Sullivans Cove and in consolidating things like people, buildings, mountains and law it acts as an ‘urban design laboratory’. A series of ‘object-laden’ lessons are taken from this laboratory by following two successive developments or ‘experiments’. First, hotel accommodation Zero Davey carried tourism through the design laboratory where it was enrolled with various orderings only some of which ‘care’ about tourism. Here the laboratory acted as a largely indifferent ‘means’ to a tourismrelated ‘end’. However, in next staging an International Design Competition these ‘means’ and ‘ends’ became transferable when to achieve a ‘winning design entry’ and ‘designer label’ for Sullivans Cove the laboratory adopted many of established ‘means’ of the tourism industry. These experiments show Sullivans Cove is ‘accidentally tourism’ and that as an ordering tourism behaves in complex and sometimes opposing ways. When tourism research includes ‘things’ as conspirators, assumptions like ‘tourism places are planned that way’ are found inadequate for recognising or explaining the more transformative abilities of tourism because these are a virtue of heterogeneous compositions and the multiple competencies they allow. By viewing tourism as an ordering it is possible to see how developments such as those in Sullivans Cove result not from within a separable and coherent realm of tourism on the social margin, but from more distributed and post humanist agency.
To support chapter 6 INTRODUCTION Place-based marketing is not particularly new. Tourism, as a pr... more To support chapter 6 INTRODUCTION Place-based marketing is not particularly new. Tourism, as a principal author of place related marketing and as a means of experiencing other places, has always formed a significant part of how places are globally perceived. Place branding however, is relatively new evolving alongside tourism branding over the past twenty-five years (Hall 2003:119). While still a problematic and ambitious project (see Ritchie and Ritchie 1998; Lodge 2002; Hall 2005), place branding has nevertheless been something of a minor miracle for the tourism industry producing the makings of a framework for country, state and province-wide, co-ordinated, targeted marketing messages. Documentaries like 'Selling Australia' (Film Australia 2001) illustrate the way the tourism industry has become quite adept at key place brand functions: defining and positioning place.
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Papers and Book Chapters by Felicity Picken
Keywords: public spaces, urban design, competition, consumerism
specific challenges for coastal local governments, who are often resource poor, managing transitional economies with unclear futures in terms of current and projected populations. This article begins with this broad landscape and focuses on two southeastern Victorian coastal areas that are known second home hotspots. Our article presents the findings of a residential survey conducted in Inverloch and Philip Island that specifically captured second home owners to discover who they are, why they have a second home in that area, what local area concerns they have, and what they intend to do with their second homes in the future. Within the limitations of our data, we find ambivalence among second home owners as a group, supporting the scholarship that identifies the difficulties of pinning this phenomenon down. That said, there are some discernible patterns among second home owners, particularly when they are put in contrast with the permanent residents of these communities.
Responding to John Urry’s call (in Climate Change and Society, 2011) to think about the implications of consumption and travel in the design of low carbon societies, this paper considers how the challenge to devise more localized forms of vacationing will impact Australian beach and beach cultures. Australian society is spatially concentrated on the coastal margins (75% live within 40kms of the coast and 25% live within 3kms), and yet, currently it is one of the highest consumers of vacationing based on flights to international locations, often to beach resorts. Current research on climate change and the beach is dominated by adaptation research, which models likely changes to geomorphology and built environments based on sea level rise. This has predicted an overall human retreat from the coast as a likely response; yet, this has not taken into account other important adaptations to climate change such as the localization of leisure and tourism. This paper argues that since Australians are unlikely to turn to their arid and agricultural interiors, it will be the coast that becomes a new and more intensive vacationing zone. Based on what we know of the previous era of mass beach
consumption in the mid-twentieth century and what we know about contemporary Australian tourism and tourists, this
paper identifies the likely dimensions and practices of beach cultures for a low-carbon Australia.
Keywords: Low Carbon Societies, Australian Beach and Coast, Localization of Vacationing, Tourism and Travel, Consumption
At first glance, the terms heritage and climate change appear to travel in opposite directions. Heritage is concerned with conserving the past, while climate change is about conserving the future. This situation is further complicated with the spatial deviation that underwater heritage represents. This paper tackles this temporal and spatial cross roads by examining a tourist attraction that transforms modern, consumer culture into heritage in the form of a fast-tracked lost civilisation beneath the sea. MUSA is a sunken sculpture museum in the Caribbean Sea that inaugurates a unique way of restoring the distressed habitats of the Meso-American Reef System, while offering a sobering glimpse into a world that asks tourists to consider ‘what have we done?’ Visitors are invited to examine their own way of life as both precarious and implicated in climate changed futures by confronting them with an Atlantis-like eeriness that both reflects and portends the closure of the tumultuous Anthropocene. The experience promotes the immediacy of the present by concretising life-sized caricatures of consumer culture beneath the sea, bequeathing these to an aquatic environment that soon transforms them into a state of decaying modernity. This promotes a theatre for radical change as these caricatures, and by extension we, are overtaken by this environment and destined to a diminutive state.
Key Words
Tourism, Heritage, Anthropocene, Climate Change, Museum
While this “model of reality” (Deleuze and Kraus, 1983) is particularly active in tourism scholarship, it is rarely made explicit. Instead, tourism is often implicitly tarnished insofar as it is receptive to the superficial, what MacCannell (1976) refers to as staged authenticity, where tourists are trapped in a ‘circular structure of reference’ (Van den Abbeele, 1980, p.9) and plagued by an industry described as deceptive (Turner, 1976 cited in Crick, 1989, p.306) and devious (Taylor, 2001, p.8). Since Plato, the nobler task has resided in the ability to distinguish essence from appearance, the original from the copy and the true from false reality (Caillois, 1984; Deleuze and Kraus, 1983; Golden, 1975). On the basis of this assumption the pilgrim, the traveller and the ethnographer have been well distinguished from tourists (Stronza, 2001; Bruner, 1989; 1994), as tourist sites are distinguishable from real ones.
Keywords: posthuman, ocean, technology, experience, space
tourist photographs are included in tourism research despite the importance of the claims that are built upon them. One of these is that cultural dupes are made from tourist photography – that
their photographic practices cast them as such – but the duping process is far from convincing or satisfactory particularly in the absence of the photographs themselves. This article tracks down
the missing tourist photographs by following the material relations that constitute the duping process and the remarkable, immaterial life of the tourist photograph as a resource for tourism scholarship. Once rediscovered, these photographs can be redeployed and increasingly are deployed in digital forms of materialism that are comparatively flexible, public and mobile. This new material configuration simultaneously casts the cultural dupe as an artefact of the analogue age and this invites examination of the power of digital contexts to trouble existing assumptions.
Stengers’ use of the ‘idiot’ can be fruitfully employed to demonstrate a tourist who misbehaves in new technological freedoms, and challenges existing scholarly interpretations and frameworks.
Keywords: public spaces, urban design, competition, consumerism
specific challenges for coastal local governments, who are often resource poor, managing transitional economies with unclear futures in terms of current and projected populations. This article begins with this broad landscape and focuses on two southeastern Victorian coastal areas that are known second home hotspots. Our article presents the findings of a residential survey conducted in Inverloch and Philip Island that specifically captured second home owners to discover who they are, why they have a second home in that area, what local area concerns they have, and what they intend to do with their second homes in the future. Within the limitations of our data, we find ambivalence among second home owners as a group, supporting the scholarship that identifies the difficulties of pinning this phenomenon down. That said, there are some discernible patterns among second home owners, particularly when they are put in contrast with the permanent residents of these communities.
Responding to John Urry’s call (in Climate Change and Society, 2011) to think about the implications of consumption and travel in the design of low carbon societies, this paper considers how the challenge to devise more localized forms of vacationing will impact Australian beach and beach cultures. Australian society is spatially concentrated on the coastal margins (75% live within 40kms of the coast and 25% live within 3kms), and yet, currently it is one of the highest consumers of vacationing based on flights to international locations, often to beach resorts. Current research on climate change and the beach is dominated by adaptation research, which models likely changes to geomorphology and built environments based on sea level rise. This has predicted an overall human retreat from the coast as a likely response; yet, this has not taken into account other important adaptations to climate change such as the localization of leisure and tourism. This paper argues that since Australians are unlikely to turn to their arid and agricultural interiors, it will be the coast that becomes a new and more intensive vacationing zone. Based on what we know of the previous era of mass beach
consumption in the mid-twentieth century and what we know about contemporary Australian tourism and tourists, this
paper identifies the likely dimensions and practices of beach cultures for a low-carbon Australia.
Keywords: Low Carbon Societies, Australian Beach and Coast, Localization of Vacationing, Tourism and Travel, Consumption
At first glance, the terms heritage and climate change appear to travel in opposite directions. Heritage is concerned with conserving the past, while climate change is about conserving the future. This situation is further complicated with the spatial deviation that underwater heritage represents. This paper tackles this temporal and spatial cross roads by examining a tourist attraction that transforms modern, consumer culture into heritage in the form of a fast-tracked lost civilisation beneath the sea. MUSA is a sunken sculpture museum in the Caribbean Sea that inaugurates a unique way of restoring the distressed habitats of the Meso-American Reef System, while offering a sobering glimpse into a world that asks tourists to consider ‘what have we done?’ Visitors are invited to examine their own way of life as both precarious and implicated in climate changed futures by confronting them with an Atlantis-like eeriness that both reflects and portends the closure of the tumultuous Anthropocene. The experience promotes the immediacy of the present by concretising life-sized caricatures of consumer culture beneath the sea, bequeathing these to an aquatic environment that soon transforms them into a state of decaying modernity. This promotes a theatre for radical change as these caricatures, and by extension we, are overtaken by this environment and destined to a diminutive state.
Key Words
Tourism, Heritage, Anthropocene, Climate Change, Museum
While this “model of reality” (Deleuze and Kraus, 1983) is particularly active in tourism scholarship, it is rarely made explicit. Instead, tourism is often implicitly tarnished insofar as it is receptive to the superficial, what MacCannell (1976) refers to as staged authenticity, where tourists are trapped in a ‘circular structure of reference’ (Van den Abbeele, 1980, p.9) and plagued by an industry described as deceptive (Turner, 1976 cited in Crick, 1989, p.306) and devious (Taylor, 2001, p.8). Since Plato, the nobler task has resided in the ability to distinguish essence from appearance, the original from the copy and the true from false reality (Caillois, 1984; Deleuze and Kraus, 1983; Golden, 1975). On the basis of this assumption the pilgrim, the traveller and the ethnographer have been well distinguished from tourists (Stronza, 2001; Bruner, 1989; 1994), as tourist sites are distinguishable from real ones.
Keywords: posthuman, ocean, technology, experience, space
tourist photographs are included in tourism research despite the importance of the claims that are built upon them. One of these is that cultural dupes are made from tourist photography – that
their photographic practices cast them as such – but the duping process is far from convincing or satisfactory particularly in the absence of the photographs themselves. This article tracks down
the missing tourist photographs by following the material relations that constitute the duping process and the remarkable, immaterial life of the tourist photograph as a resource for tourism scholarship. Once rediscovered, these photographs can be redeployed and increasingly are deployed in digital forms of materialism that are comparatively flexible, public and mobile. This new material configuration simultaneously casts the cultural dupe as an artefact of the analogue age and this invites examination of the power of digital contexts to trouble existing assumptions.
Stengers’ use of the ‘idiot’ can be fruitfully employed to demonstrate a tourist who misbehaves in new technological freedoms, and challenges existing scholarly interpretations and frameworks.
Felicity Picken, Palgrave Macmillan Press.
Oceans remain among the least measured, formatted and socialised spaces on Earth (Latour 2005). While marine-related sciences, archaeologists, geographers, historians and cultural theorists have become active in bringing oceans to the fore, there is no sociological work that attempts to do this. Consequently, sociology remains land-locked (Lambert et al. 2006) and subject to a land bias (Peters 2010) that has not only limited its utility in explanations of ocean space, but also denied it a laboratory with the potential to unlock established habits of thought. Theories about society are, by default, theories about the conditions of life on land and this statement appears utterly banal until a social life beneath the sea is contemplated. This book illustrates this position by demonstrating how forays into ocean space not only construct new relationships between humans and nature and new experiential dimensions, but also highlight the primacy of land-based co-ordinates in theorising ourselves and apprehending our place in the world. The book is also timely, since never before has there been such interest in, and earnest contemplation of, undersea worlds. These are now understood as serious contenders in climate change solutions, as spaces of refuge in the face of environmental extremes and uncertainty on land.
This book provides an opportunity for scholars in the human sciences and educated readers more generally to familiarise themselves with a social space that is truly emergent, not yet properly invented or constructed, but gaining importance as life on a blue planet is more fully considered. As an emergent social space and field of inquiry, undersea is highly instructional in the social life of extreme environments and, conversely, the less extreme conditions of life on land that are taken for granted. The 21st century has witnessed an explosion in underwater imagery, in scuba diving as one of the fastest growing recreational pursuits and in aquaria, penetrating everyday spaces or else much bigger spaces, holding entire undersea ecosystems on land. Undersea is also host to elaborate and unprecedented levels of underwater development as the built environment is also being seeded undersea in underwater museums, art galleries and hotels. These are no longer dreams but are developing at pace in both the global north and south culminating in the construction of self supporting underwater habitats in anticipation of climatic induced transformation and need for alternative living space .
All of these are forging new cultural economies, new social worlds and human experiences that have not yet been assembled in such a way that their effects can begin to be understood or anticipated. With cases spanning offshore Cancún, through to Florida Keys and the Maldives, to occupied France in WWII and Swiss engineering in Dubai, this book traces the way in which people have begun to be interpolated by life beneath the sea, with the explicit aim of composing the beginnings of a blue sociology.
This book is distinctive in possessing three unique attributes:
• Substantially, it is the first to undertake a sociological analysis of underwater worlds and to develop an understanding about how these are performed and their transformative capacities.
• Sociologically, it is the first to investigate the importance and limitations of land to established ideas about human identity and social life.
• Methodologically, by attending to social life in a forcefully interactive space like the ocean, this book draws upon contemporary social theory to provide a relationally material account of society when it cannot avoid the indifference of non-humans.
These attributes form the basis of a critically constructive examination that enlivens contemporary sociological debates about human-nature relations in contemporary contexts. These debates include the place of non-humans, ontological knowledge and post-humanism in the real and anticipated threat of environmental crises; in the emergence of new cultural economies based on oceanic space and in the promises and challenges of life on a blue planet. The book produces a platform from which radical implications for both the discipline of sociology and the ‘futures’ in which it increasingly works are made evident. These will be relevant and translatable to the social sciences generally, to interdisciplinary field of oceanic studies and to the growing interest in Science and Technology Studies, as well as educated general readers.
All undersea interventions are highly technological, scientific and social in dimension and this privileges new sociological approaches that treat science and technology, nature and humans symmetrically. Crucially, blue sociology can only be oxygenated by attending to the deployment of heterogeneous materials in social analysis, not least of which is the very lively, and to humans the life depleting, proposition of oceanic nature itself. This validates social investigations that aim to accommodate new members of society - an extended democracy of things (Latour 1991/1993) - where life on and within a blue planet is an entirely collaborative affair.
The book employs contemporary sociological approaches including Actor-Network Theory, Post humanism, Post sociality and Relational Materialism, as described by key theorists in this field including Bruno Latour, John Law, Michelle Serres, Nigel Clark and John Urry.
- Discover the range of encounters that are being produced in large public aquaria in Australia;
- Uncover the emerging challenges, opportunities and priority research areas for public aquaria;
- Build capacity for further, collaborative research with industry partners, domestic and international scholars.
- Advance the methodological and theoretical opportunities afforded by investigating non-conventional, undersea space.
Fieldwork at all seven, large public aquaria in Australia will address a significant gap in the knowledge and remove a formidable barrier to further research. A critical analysis of the range and extent of encounters that are produced across all sites provides important base-line data. Engaging key industry stakeholders to identify challenges, opportunities and priority research areas for public aquaria will add a solid, evidence-based foundation for collaborative work.
The beach is one of the most iconic spaces in Australia and Australian photographers contribute significantly to this. Many have established their careers through the beach and have connected it to a more global “aesthetic consumption of the shore” (Urbain 2003: 68). Modernist photographer Max Dupain became established in this manner through his representation of ‘The Sunbaker’ (1937) and ‘Bondi’ (1939), setting a standard for many of his contemporaries. The relationship between the beach, the artist and the camera entices those who consume these representations into a more tangible relationship with the beach and this is a common narrative for explaining tourism destinations. Professional photography translates the beach in the public domain but less consideration is given to the photographic relationship between the beach and tourists themselves. While the former serves to entice the multitudes, the latter serves to memorialise the beach experience in the private realm. For this reason, they are less accessible, and supposed to be less influential, than those public images that are privileged in research on tourism and travel. This paper breaks with this tradition by taking account of Australian beach photography as it is enacted by ‘ordinary Australians’ and how the everyday art of photography performs the beach in less formal, yet still ‘stylistically specified ways’ (Adler 1989: 1368). In describing the kind of memories tourists seek to make durable, the concept of art is broadened to include the practice of holiday ‘happy snaps’ and it becomes possible to discover whether there is an expanding content of beach vernacular or whether Australians attempt to replicate the images that entice them in the first place.