Reflections on institutional and paradigmatic changes in tourism geography: a Canadian perspective

Geography, with its focus on the interactions of people and places, should be at the very core of tourism studies. Indeed in the early years of academic interest in tourism studies, geographers were seminal contributors. In Canada, in the 1980s, with the rapid international development of new interdisciplinary tourism programs, the contributions of Canadian tourism geographers, most notably Richard Butler (tourism area evolution); Geoff Wall (economic, environmental and social impacts) and Peter Murphy (community–based tourism) were important not only in stimulating widespread research in these areas, but also in developing strong graduate programs at their universities that over the years produced substantial numbers of PhD scholars in tourism geography. However, in today's interdisciplinary tourism studies programs, the distinctiveness of geographic perspectives seems less evident, despite the fact that many geographers find employment in such programs. Parallel with this, the number of tourism scholars within departments of geography seems to be waning. Building upon thoughts from an earlier paper (Gill, 2012), and my observations of Canadian universities over the past few decades, I briefly reflect on the influence of changing institutional priorities and evolving paradigmatic shifts within the social sciences that are impacting the sub-discipline of tourism geography and the nature of scholarship in this arena.

Institutionally, the majority of interdisciplinary tourism studies programs are housed in business- and management-related faculties. This, in turn, influences decisions of faculty members (including many trained as geographers) with respect to research focus and choice of publication outlets. In many cases, discipline-based tourism geographers, who navigate interdisciplinary territory, may find themselves marginalized within their departments, often operating as ‘lone-wolves’. Exceptions to this in Ontario are at Brock University with its merged Department of Geography and Tourism Studies, where interest in tourism geography is more distributed across faculty members; and at the University of Waterloo's Department of Geography and Environmental Management, where there are two senior faculty members in tourism geography who serve to maintain an institutional research profile in this area. A critical mass of research and graduate supervision in tourism is further supported at the University of Waterloo through interaction with the University's long-established interdisciplinary Recreation and Leisure Department and nearby Wilfrid Laurier University.

In other universities, tourism geography may be perceived as peripheral to core aspects of the discipline, despite the fact that at the undergraduate level, tourism geography courses often enjoy high enrolment. With a number of tourism geographers hired in the 1980s now retiring, opportunities for obtaining replacement positions appear limited. This primarily reflects institutional fiscal constraints and the challenge for geography departments to maintain core geographic competencies in their hiring priorities. A reduction in the appointment of tourism geographers to departments of geography will result in declining numbers of PhD graduates in this area and tourism-related courses could disappear from the undergraduate curriculum. This changing institutional environment also presents challenges for newly graduated tourism geographers seeking academic appointments, especially in research-intensive universities. They will need to pay careful attention to how they frame their ‘identity’ with respect to their research domain and expertise. However, some employment opportunities do exist in smaller universities that emphasize undergraduate teaching and offer courses on more applied aspects of tourism management.

However, all is not doom and gloom. Whilst these changing institutional environments may make tourism geographers less visible with respect to their identity as geographers, evolving research paradigm shifts associated with the cultural and critical turns in the social sciences, together with widespread concern regarding the economic, social and environmental implications of tourism, offer many new ‘research spaces’ for geographers to contribute their unique skills. Discourses surrounding such issues as sustainability, climate change, equity, political ecology and the experience economy are now widespread across disciplines. With the role of tourism increasingly seen as an integral component of broader societal concerns in the twenty-first century, geographers have a significant role to play in grounding such critical debates in ‘place’.

To conclude, I am hopeful that the contributions of tourism geographers to scholarship will increasingly become acknowledged, not only by other geographers, but also by the interdisciplinary institutions of tourism studies. In the twenty-first century, in an era of globalization and new communications technology, knowledge flows freely and disciplinary and knowledge boundaries are becoming increasingly porous. As Gregson (2003, p. 7) argues, ‘ours is an increasingly interdisciplinary world in which the geographical is critical but not ours to possess’. Maybe we should be less concerned about our disciplinary identity and ‘labels’ and embrace our role as inter-disciplinarians. When I began my academic career, I felt confident in being able to identify fellow ‘geographers’ … now I'm not so sure that I can.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.