Performing Cultural Tourism ─ Communities, Tourists and Creative Practices

While experiential staging is well documented in tourism studies, not enough has been written about the diverse types of experiences and expectations that visitors bring to the tourist space and how communities respond to, or indeed challenge, these expectations. This book brings together new ideas about cultural experiences and how communities, creative producers, and visitors can productively engage with competing interests and notions of experience and authenticity in the tourist environment.

Part I considers the experiences of communities in meeting the needs of cultural tourists in an international context. Part II analyses the relationships between individualcultural tourists, the community, and digital technology. Finally, Part III responds to new methodologies in relation to interactions between government and regional policy and community development.

Focusing on the way in which communities and visitors ‘perform’ new forms of cultural tourism, Performing Cultural Tourism is aimed at undergraduate students, researchers, academics, and a diverse range of professionals at both private and government levels that are seeking to develop policies and business plans that recognize and respond to new interests in contemporary tourism.

Susan Carson, Associate Professor, teaches and researches in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. She received her PhD from the University of Queensland, Brisbane, and now publishes in the fields of cultural tourism, Australian studies and postgraduate pedagogy. Susan’s most recent publication in the tourism sector is ‘Literature, tourism and the city: Writing and cultural change’ with Lesley Hawkes, Kari Gislason and Kate Cantrell in the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change (2016). She reviews submissions for international journals in the tourism sector as well as for creative industries journals, and is the co-author of a national Australian government Office of Learning and Teaching report into creative practice-led research in Australian universities (2014).

Mark Pennings is a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory in Visual Arts in the Creative Industries Faculty of the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Pennings’ research interests include visual arts, cultural tourism, the experience economy, cultural and political theory, social and sporting history and pedagogy in international learning. He teaches postwar and contemporary art, and runs study tours to New York City and Tokyo. Pennings has produced many art reviews, catalogue essays and articles in journals such as Art Forum, Art Monthly, Art and Australia and Eyeline. He has presented national and international conference papers in the field of cultural tourism, and is interested in the impact of corporate culture on the infrastructures of tourism in a global experience economy. He has studied art and art museums in experiencescapes, and has examined the role of Museum of Old and New Art (Hobart) and the Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane) in Australian cultural tourism.