Dr Phoebe Everingham

Australia¿s COVID-19 response has been one of containment and suppression with tightly regulated borders and restrictions on mobility. As an island nation, Australia has considerable advantages in terms of geographic isolation and population density, with quarantining the key strategy for containing the virus coming in from overseas. This has enabled Australia to be relatively virus-free. With such few cases, testing and tracing systems have been able to contain the virus within relatively small geographical locations. In comparison to other parts of the world Australia has been relatively unscathed from the most extreme impacts of COVID-19. In relation to tourism, there have been two major impacts (1) no international tourists in Australia (2) no Australians travelling overseas. While tourism operators that have relied on international tourists have suffered, other tourism operators have thrived due to the domestic-led initiatives for Australians to explore their own backyards. Various initiatives focus on reimaging the visitor economy away from international markets, towards encouraging Australians to spend more money within their own borders. This chapter explores the possibilities with this momentum to rethink tourism and travel more broadly in relation to how we live our everyday lives. We argue that this ¿tourism reset¿ allows us to reimagine our being-in-the-world; our lives, habits and routines, for the betterment of social and ecological sustainability, through rethinking leisure time more holistically. Taking a ¿more-than tourism¿ perspective we argue that some of the underlying motivations for travel ¿ such as relaxation, joy, wonder and connection can and should be implemented in our everyday lives, and that this is necessary for rethinking our relationships to each other and the natural world for more sustainable and equitable futures.

Using an investigative research method, this paper explores the neo-liberal paradigm of governance used to stage high-octane urban motor racing events. The discussion details the tactics used by Supercars Australia to anticipate and manage resistance from the impacted community through a process we term the ¿juggernaut effect¿. This study of the Newcastle 500 Supercar race in Newcastle, NSW found information tightly controlled by a Public/Private Partnership, which swept aside due democratic process to privilege the interests of a private corporation over community. The ¿juggernaut effect¿ shows how power was manifested through boosterism, brinkmanship and secrecy. This paper investigates ¿why¿ and ¿how¿ due process is so frequently absent in event contexts. In so doing, it questions broader assumptions about the touted benefits of these events and challenges the ethics of entrepreneurial governance where government agencies may employ a marketing mandate to corrupt ethical considerations and the public¿s expectations of due process.

This article analyses the recent closure of the Uluru climb in the settler colonial context of Australia and reflects on (im)possibilities for doing tourism otherwise to practices and logics of coloniality. Tourism at Uluru is embedded within settler colonial map-making, privileging supply side models of consumption at the expense of the Anangu Traditional Custodians. We contribute to the emerging body of research in tourism that argues for a dismantling of colonial logics in practice and theory and discuss the possibilities inherent in forms of tourism led by the Aboriginal custodians. In this context, tourism can promote deeper engagement to place that is ¿more-than-human¿, beyond the Eurocentric dualisms of nature and culture, human/non-human/spirit. Unlearning coloniality is key for promoting transformative tourism.

In this article we map the 20 year trajectory of theorising embodiment in Tourist Studies. From its inception in 2001, embedded within the turn in the social sciences towards embodiment, Tourist Studies has paved the way in pushing the boundaries of theorising the links between embodiment, sensuality and performativity. Tourist Studies has opened up novel trajectories in tourism research away from the traditional focus on vision, towards multi-sensual analysis including the role of taste, smell, touch and sound. In this article we draw attention to these important contributions in understanding the body-practices and body-subjects within tourism, including work that utilises non-representational analyses, relational materiality, affect, more-than-representational and more-than-human. About 20 years on we remind readers of what theorising embodiment can bring to understanding encounters in tourism spaces, and specifically how attention to embodiment moves analysis away from fixed and static notions of culture and power, towards dynamic interplays between bodies and more-than-human modalities.

Buen Vivir (BV) is a holistic vision for social and environmental wellbeing, which includes alternative economic activities to the neoliberal growth economy. This article looks at how tourism initiatives under a BV approach can lead to degrowth by drawing on a case study of how BV is put into practice through tourism in the Cotacachi County in Ecuador. We argue that by degrowing socially and environmentally damaging extractive sectors and growing alternative economic activities like community-based tourism, a BV approach could increase social and environmental wellbeing. We refer to LaTouche¿s notion of degrowth as a matrix of multiple alternatives that will reopen the space for human creativity. This complements the notion of BV as a plural approach, and in turn works to decolonise the parameters of how we might understand degrowth. In the case of Cotacachi, the vision for tourism is based on the needs of the community, rather than to satisfy a Eurocentric ideal of development supported by a policy of extractivism. BV is key to how this community conceptualises the potentialities of tourism because it considers the wellbeing of the people and the environment. In this case, degrowth is a consequence of BV, rather than the objective.

Volunteer tourism has been criticised for promoting neo-colonial discourses of development aid. To date, there is a dearth of research into organisations that do not overtly position themselves within a development aid context. This article draws on ethnographic research within a small-scale organisation in Ecuador, Fundacion Arte del Mundo, which promotes the creative arts, intercultural learning and mutuality as core to its volunteerism. This article highlights the benefits and potentialities of emphasising such intercultural learning exchanges and suggests that the predominance of development aid discourses, both in the practice and critiques of volunteer tourism can obscure a more serious engagement with such examples of learning and mutuality as constitutive of a less paternalistic volunteer tourism. The article argues that the experiences evident in the volunteerism of Fundacion Arte del Mundo at times actively subvert and decentre neo-colonial binaries and power differentials that often underpin exchanges between volunteers and the local community. By drawing attention to experiences of intercultural learning and mutuality, the article serves to shift the framing of discussion and practices of volunteer tourism away from those which consistently draw on neo-colonial binaries as the reference point of analysis and in doing so reify their interpretive power. © 2014, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.