Slow Tourism: Experiences and Mobilities(54 Aspects of Tourism)

Bringing together scholars from the areas of tourism, leisure and cultural studies, eco-humanities and tourism management, this book examines the emerging phenomenon of slow tourism. The book explores the range of travel experiences that are part of growing consumer concerns with quality leisure time, environmental and cultural sustainability, as well as the embodied experience of place. Slow tourism encapsulates a range of lifestyle practices, mobilities and ethics that are connected to social movements such as slow food and cities, as well as specialist sectors such as ecotourism and voluntourism. The slow experience of temporality can evoke and incite different ways of being and moving, as well as different logics of desire that value travel experiences as forms of knowledge. Slow travel practices reflect a range of ethical-political positions that have yet to be critically explored in the academic literature despite the growth of industry discourse.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Starting Slow: Thinking Through Slow Mobilities and Experiences - Simone Fullagar, Kevin Markwell, Erica Wilson  Positioning Slow Tourism  Chapter 2: Speeding Up and Slowing Down: Pilgrimage and Slow Travel Through Time - Chris Howard  Chapter 3: On the Periphery of Pleasure: Hedonics, Eudaimonics and Slow Travel - Kevin Moore  Chapter 4: Slow’n Down the Town to Let Nature Grow: Ecotourism, Social Justice and Sustainability - Stephen Wearing, Michael Wearing and Matthew McDonald  Slow Food and Sustainable Tourism  Chapter 5: The Contradictions and Paradoxes of Slow Food: Environmental Change, Sustainability and the Conservation of Taste - C. Michael Hall  Chapter 6: Eat Your Way Through Culture: Gastronomic Tourism as Performance and Bodily Experience - Fabio Parasecoli and Paulo de Abreu e Lima  Chapter 7: “Make haste slowly”: Environmental Sustainability and Willing Workers on Organic Farms - Margo Lipman and Laurie Murphy  Slow Mobilities  Chapter 8: Gendered Cultures of Slow Travel: Women’s Cycle Touring as Alternative Hedonism - Simone Fullagar  Chapter 9: Wandering Australia: Independent Travellers and Slow Journeys through Time and Space - Marg Tiyce and Erica Wilson  Chapter 10: The Truth of the Body on Random Roads: The Resurgence of Hitchhiking and ‘Self-powered’ Practices - Michael O’Regan  Chapter 11: ‘If you’re making waves then you have to slow down’: Slow Tourism and Canals - Julia Fallon  Slow Tourism Places  Chapter 12: Travellin’ Around on Yukon Time in Canada’s North - Suzanne de la Barre  Chapter 13: ‘Fast Japan, Slow Japan’: Shifting to Slow Tourism as a Rural Regeneration Tool in Japan - Meiko Murayama and Gavin Parker  Chapter 14: Tribe Tourism: A Case Study of the Tribewanted Project on Vorovoro, Fiji - Dawn Gibson, Stephen Pratt & Apisalome Movono  Chapter 15: Slow Tourism Initiatives: An Exploratory Study of Dutch Lifestyle Entrepreneurs in France - Esther Groenendaal  Chapter 16: Slow Travel and Indian Culture: Philosophical and Practical Aspects - Sagar Singh Chapter 17: Reconceptualising Slow Travel and Tourism - Kevin Markwell, Simone Fullagar and Erica Wilson 

About the Author :
Simone Fullagar is an interdisciplinary sociologist who has published widely across the areas of health, leisure and tourism, using post-structuralist and feminist perspectives. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Tourism, Leisure, Hotel and Sport Management at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. Kevin Markwell is Associate Professor at the School of Business and Tourism, Southern Cross University, Australia. His research focuses on human-animal studies, tourist-nature relationships, wildlife tourism and gay tourism. Erica Wilson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management at Southern Cross University. Erica teaches in the areas of sustainable tourism and special interest tourism, and her research publications reflect her scholarly interests in women's travel and adventure, work-life balance, sustainable tourism and critical approaches to tourism research.

Review :
In this well researched collection of 17 chapters written by key scholars this book critically engages with the question: what do slow mobilities mean for tourism? Providing international case studies, multidisciplinary, philosophical and theoretical explorations, the book contributes timely, new and refreshing insights that should be read by anyone interested in the emerging phenomenon of slow travel. This book's contributors pose a number of fascinating questions, particularly what do slow mobilities mean for tourism, do slow mobilities suggest different ways of engaging with people and place and do slow travel experiences lead us to connect with and understand the world differently? Their explorations are stimulating and thought-provoking. This is a book whose time has come; indeed its editors are ahead of the curve in assembling a collection of tourism-focused essays which challenge today's unrelenting and ultimately unsustainable pace of life. It makes for fascinating reading. One quality of this collection is its global reach, in which contributions from ‘‘down-under’’ bring a much needed diversity and enrichment to the literature. The editors fulfill their goal that ‘‘this collection will add to the body of knowledge concerning this emerging tourism phenomenon’’…This collection is to be commended for its conceptual debates and widening of the optic, and for its recognition that slow tourism is an emerging tourism phenomenon with genuine promise and potential. Commendably, there are several exceptional contributions to be found here. This edited collection is a timely and multidisciplinary contribution to an evolving concept. This volume is impressive in its scope and multiple perspectives, both theoretically and empirically. This book is one of the first to focus specifically on Slow Tourism and should be lauded for its multidisciplinary focus, contributions to theory, and empirical examples. The debates that this thought-provoking edition raises are also important. This book provides unique insights on slow tourism initiatives. It will offer good ideas to tourism students and academic researchers who are interested in conducting studies on various aspects of alternative tourism, because it is one of the very few available books on slow tourism for sustainability. This book offers plentiful of remarks worthy for readers in tourism and hospitality, sociologists and mobilities-oriented academics. It presents a collected anthology of how ‘slow tourism’ can be studied from different perspectives while proposing how such movements might act out important roles in the development of more sustainable and ecofriendly tourism futures. This is an important and worthy call. The present volume brings together a series of contributions on this as yet unexplored area of mobilities theory and practice. Coming from the fields of tourism, leisure and cultural studies, tourism management, and ecohumanities, the 17 contributors debate a range of relevant themes, including lifestyle mobilities and practices, travel ethics, leisure time, and cultural and environmental sustainability.