scholarly journals How to Become a “Real Chicagoan” in No Time: The Promise and Pedagogy of Walking Tourism

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Henry
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Urban Tourism ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Tour Guides ◽  
Walking Tour ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Cultural Cues

This study takes seriously the tourist’s desire to feel like a local and examines how walking tour guides work toward fulfilling that desire. The paper examines some of the techniques used by urban walking tour guides to convey local cultural cues. The tourist, armed with these cues, may feel able to fit into a new culture as a quasi-insider. Through qualitative methods, primarily participant observation, the researcher identifies three tactics that guides implement to make the tourist to feel like a local. These tactics are labeled agent alignment, urban alchemy, and material action. These tactics take place within a borderzone, the liminal time-space between insider and outsider status. A successful guide facilitates the border crossing, allowing the tourist to transition from tourist to perceived ‘real Chicagoan.’ However, the unsuccessful guide forces tourists to exit the borderzone unchanged, still as tourists. These findings highlight the uniqueness of walking tourism as a niche tourism and wade into the conceptual milieu of ‘localism’ and ‘the local.’ KEYWORDS: Walking Tourism; Urban Tourism; Tour Guides; Localization; Interculturalism; Urban Alchemy; Agent Alignment; Chicago

scholarly journals TACTICS OF BORDER CROSSING MOVEMENT: EXPLORING THE MOBILITY OF BRAZILIANS THROUGH THE SCHENGEN AND UK AIRSPACE

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (5) ◽  
pp. 216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gustavo Dias
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Research Orientation ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Embodied Practice

This paper addresses the relations between migrants, mobility, tactics, negotiation, and the contemporary definition of borders in the aftermath of 9/11.The empirical focus of this paper is how Brazilians from Alto Paranaiba journey through airports located in the Schengen area and in the British territory to London. As a main research orientation, I use the notion of journey as approached by mobility studies, where actions and skills remain an important link between the wayfarer and the social space in which s/he moves through, the embodied practice to how we grasp the world. Migrants deal and struggle against border regime, but they are not powerless social actors. They rather produce creative resistance to reinvent their journey through the surveillance apparatus, which manage and delimit places with targets and threats. In this process, I explore the notion of border crossing movement as a tactical mobility developed by migrants to overcome the border control imposed by governments in airports. The article was drawn through fieldwork conducted initially in London, between 2009 and 2013, and afterwards in Alto Paranaiba, during 2013. The ethnographic study consisted in semi-structured interviews, participant observation through snowball technique, which enabled me to access a considerable number of participants in these two regions explored. The argument that I develop is that migrants as social actors are part important in the dialogue produced between border crossing and border reinforcement.

scholarly journals Developing homestay to support community-based tourism

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 390
Author(s):  
Ilham Junaid ◽  
Nur Salam ◽  
Muh. Arfin M. Salim
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Tourism Industry ◽  
Tourism Destination ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Tour Guides

Wakatobi regency has been chosen as a ten-top priority tourism destination in Indonesia. It provides the opportunity for the local community to obtain benefits through tourism. The aims of this research are 1) to study the expectation of the community related to the management of homestay as accommodation business; 2) to analyse challenges and provide recommendations concerning how to implement community-based tourism on the perspective of community as the organiser of the homestay. Qualitative research conducted in March 2018 by visiting Wakatobi for participant observation and interviews three community members or homestay managers, two tour guides and two people from the tourism industry (accommodation). The research indicates that tourism has encouraged the local community to manage homestay, although there are members of the community require motivation and support to understand the significances of managing homestay and tourism. The management of homestay by the local community links to the implementation of community-based tourism and to optimise the management of homestay; it is necessary to provide sustainable training for the local community as well as to empower people through local tourism organisation. Key attractors such as activities and alternative attractions for the visitors are essential for the management of homestay. Limited numbers of tourists who choose homestay to become the challenge for homestay management, thus, the local community expects that the increasing number of tourists as well as a willingness by tourists to choose homestay as their accommodation. 

scholarly journals On a Walking Tour to No Man’s Land: Brokering and Shifting Narratives of Violence in Trench Town, Jamaica

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-60
Author(s):  
Alana Osbourne
Keyword(s):  
Structural Violence ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Tour Guides ◽  
Walking Tour ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
No Man's Land ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Musical Heritage

Tourists who visit Trench Town are drawn in by the neighborhood’s rich musical heritage. They want to see the birthplace of reggae and witness the circumstances depicted in many famous Jamaican songs. Knowingly venturing into marginalized territory, into the “ghetto,” travelers expect to encounter spectacular forms of violence. Yet what the walking tour of Trench Town reveals is an experience of another kind, an excursion that exposes poverty as structural violence, and that points to the historical and political struggles that are constitutive of the area’s social fabric. In this article, drawing on an ethnographic vignette of a walking tour that starts in Bob Marley’s rehearsal grounds and ends by an empty plot locally known as “No Man’s Land,” I focus on the entanglements of violence and tourism and present the discrepancy that exists between touristic desires and the reality of the tourism commodity. This analysis reveals how residents of Trench Town simultaneously choose to address and disregard different (un)spectacular forms of violence during the tourism encounter and I argue that in so doing, local tour guides productively leverage violence to denounce and grapple with structural and historical brutalities.

The intimate-mobility entanglement: Subaltern trajectories in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands

2020 ◽  
pp. 239965442093072
Author(s):  
Masaya Llavaneras Blanco
Keyword(s):  
Participant Observation ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Intimate Violence ◽  
Domestic Worker ◽  
Individual Interviews ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Spatial Trajectories ◽  
The Way

This article argues that intimacy and human (im)mobilities are interrelated, and that this relationship is integral to the way borders function and are experienced. I propose the concept of intimate-mobility entanglement to describe this relationship of interdependence. Based on primary research conducted with Haitian domestic workers that work in the Dominican Republic (DR), the article illustrates how intimate labour functions as a driver and a strategy for human (im)mobility. The article characterizes the interactions between (im)mobility and intimacy as a relationship of entanglement that is observable in domestic work, childrearing, intimate violence, border crossing and access to the right to nationality. The article centers on the spatial trajectory of Marie, a Haitian woman who works as a domestic worker in a Dominican border town after having lived and worked in several towns in the DR for twenty years. Marie’s spatial trajectories illuminate how the intimate-mobility entanglement is integral to the Dominican border regime. Through individual interviews, participant observation and mapping Marie’s journeys through Haitian and Dominican territories, the article revisits her spatial trajectories and sheds light on the dual relationship between the intimate-mobility entanglement and the border regime. On the one hand, the entanglement intervenes in the way the border is reinforced in the actual border strip while it also stretches out into Dominican territory. On the other, the border regime conditions Marie’s labour, how she moves and settles down, and influences how intimate labours are carried out and experienced. Building on a tradition of feminist and subaltern geographies, as well as on mobilities literature, the article presents a contextualized analysis of the politics of subaltern mobilities and explains how intimacy and intimate labours are critical aspects of how borders work.

Experiencing intentional recognition: Welcoming immigrants in Dayton, Ohio

Urban Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 384-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Housel ◽  
Colleen Saxen ◽  
Tom Wahlrab
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Recent Immigrants ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The City

What is possible if Dayton became a city that intentionally welcomed immigrants? This question was the starting point for a community conversation about the wellbeing of and outreach toward immigrants in a midsize city in southwest Ohio – the City of Dayton. This paper examines the processes employed to support the emergence of an immigrant-welcoming initiative now called ‘Welcome Dayton’. Early conversations resulted in a formal plan, written by the community and endorsed by city commissioners, which realigned and crystallised local priorities, sparking a wide spectrum of efforts aimed at becoming a welcoming city. Using qualitative methods, primarily participant observation, we identified practices of creating spaces where both long-time residents and recent immigrants come together in a way that recognises and reveals the value of each participant’s perspectives and ideas. Herein we examine the practices of creating and sustaining Welcome Dayton, paying particular attention to the role of recognition in generating ‘resourcefulness’ in the community.

scholarly journals Insecure positions, heteronomous autonomy and tourism-cultural capital: A Bourdieusian reading of tour guides on BBC Worldwide’s Doctor Who Experience Walking Tour

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 426-442
Author(s):  
Ross Garner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Doctor Who ◽  
Tour Guide ◽  
Institutional Level ◽  
Tour Guides ◽  
Walking Tour ◽  
Cardiff Bay ◽  
Tour Guiding

This article contributes towards debates concerning media tourism and tour guiding by using Pierre Bourdieu’s arguments regarding field and capital to analyse performed tour guide identities on BBC Worldwide’s Doctor Who Experience Walking Tour in Cardiff Bay. The article pursues three core arguments: first, a Bourdieusian framework provides an enhanced understanding of the insecure positions that tour guides occupy in what is referred to throughout as the tourism field; second, the divergent pulls between heteronomous and autonomous poles which position tour guides are magnified in officially-located media tours because of the presence of branding and theming discourses; third, drawing upon empirical data from the Doctor Who tour, the symbolic capital of official guides involves demonstrations of what is named tourism-cultural capital, but such displays do not result in an increase in individualised status as any accrued capital transfers to the institutional level.

Philosophies of Qualitative Research

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svend Brinkmann
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Document Analysis ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Separate Section ◽  
Research Theme ◽  
Methods And Techniques ◽  
Do So

This book is about the different philosophical paradigms and ideas that influence qualitative research. Its aim is to discuss and evaluate the ways that philosophical positions inform qualitative research as currently practiced. Unlike other contributions to the field, this book takes a historical perspective and shows how the philosophical ideas have evolved and influenced qualitative research in previous times and today. Today, qualitative researchers often report on their philosophical commitments (if they do so at all) in a separate section of their papers, but this book is written from the perspective that philosophical ideas influence everything in the research process from the first formulation of a research theme to the final reporting of the results. Therefore, it is preferable to highlight how this happens. Philosophy should thus not be thought of as a purely abstract discipline, disconnected from the practicalities of research, but rather as a concrete and pervasive aspect of all qualitative research practices. This book does not provide in-depth treatments of qualitative methods and techniques such as interviewing, document analysis, or participant observation, but rather aims to introduce and discuss the philosophical issues that are relevant regardless of the specific methods employed by qualitative researchers.

Foreigners, fakes and flycatchers: stereotypes, social encounters and the problem of discomfort on the street in Arusha, Tanzania

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-416
Author(s):  
Martin Loeng
Keyword(s):  
Participant Observation ◽  
Development Project ◽  
Tourism Industry ◽  
Urban Tourism ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Online Forums ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Social Encounters ◽  
Connect Space

Purpose This paper aims to contribute to research on the interrelations between urban tourism, travelling and landscapes. It shows how young visitors to the tourism-reliant city of Arusha, northern Tanzania, experience and interpret discomfiting encounters with street sellers by drawing on stereotypes circulating in guidebooks, online forums and in the tourism industry. In turn, such re-interpreted encounters are increasingly seen as problematic for the city’s development of urban tourism. Design/methodology/approach The author draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with tourist-product street sellers in Arusha and Moshi, Tanzania in 2015–2017. With detail-oriented focus on social interaction and communication, the author has used participant observation and interviews to understand the perspectives and actions involved. Complementing this, the author draws on interviews with tour companies and local authorities to connect everyday occurrences with broader political, economic and urban transformations. Findings This paper explores the interrelation between changing urban landscapes, gentrification and burgeoning urban tourism by highlighting not only how streets are created and sought to be re-created but how also re-interpreted stories and stereotypes fundamentally influence how it is understood by local authorities. As the consumption of place, shopping and foreigners’ experiences take centre stage in Arusha’s urban development project, practices and people that are re-interpreted as causes of discomfort, become objects of ordering and discipline. Originality/value This paper emphasizes that the social encounters beyond dichotomies of host–guest relationships are a fruitful and important means of investigating how “encounters” connect space to power, the street to urban planning and mundane on-the-street interactions to processes of transformation and gentrification. This paper presents a reading of “landscapes” not as a text, but as a series of encounters that catch our attention when and where they break our norms, or the norms of others.

scholarly journals How and Why Interviews Work: Ethnographic Interviews and Meso-level Public Culture

2019 ◽  
pp. 004912411988247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Rinaldo ◽  
Jeffrey Guhin
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Meso Level ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews

Recent debates about qualitative methods have discussed the relative limitations and contributions of interviews in comparison to surveys and participant observation. These discussions have rarely considered how ethnographers themselves use interviews as part of their work. We suggest that Lizardo’s discussion of three modes of culture (declarative, nondeclarative, and public) help us to understand the separate contributions of observation and interviews, with ethnographic interviews an especially helpful means of accessing different cultural modes. We also argue that Lizardo’s conception of public culture should be divided into meso- and macrolevels and that this division helps to show the differing contributions of interviews within and without an ethnographic context. Developing our argument with data from the second author’s ethnographic research and analysis of other scholars’ ethnographies, we show how research that uses ethnographic interviews can help sociologists better understand how these four cultural modes interact.

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