Moral Encounters in Tourism

This first full length treatment of the role of morality in tourism examines how the tourism encounter is also fundamentally a moral encounter. Drawing upon interdisciplinary perspectives, leading and new authors in the field address topics that range from volunteer tourism to fertility tourism to reveal new insights into the ways tourism encounters are implicated in, and contribute to, broader moral reconfigurations in Western and non-Western contexts. Illustrating the role of power and power relations in tourism encounters within different political, economic, environmental and cultural contexts, the authors in this anthology analyse, theoretically and empirically, the implications of the privileging of some moralities at the expense of others. Key themes include the moral consumption of tourism experiences, embodiment in tourism encounters, environmental moralities as well as methodological aspects of morality in tourism research. Crossing disciplinary and chronological boundaries, Moral Encounters in Tourism provides a much-anticipated overview of this new interdisciplinary terrain and offers possible routes for new research on the intersection of morality and tourism studies.

Notes on Contributors, 1. Introducing Moral Encounters in Tourism, Section 1: Moral Consumption in Tourism, 2. Moralizing Tourism: Personal Qualities, Political Issues, 3. International Volunteer Tourism as (De)commodified Moral Consumption, 4. The Re-Enchantment of Development: Creating Value for Volunteers in Nepal, 5. Tourism Development, Architectures of Escape and the Passive Beloved in Contemporary Yucatán (México), Section 2: Embodied Tourism Encounters, 6. Reproductive Fugitives, Fertility ‘Exiles’ or Just Parents? Assessing Possible Approaches to the Governance of Cross-Border Fertility Tourism, 7. Gazing at Kayan Female Bodies as Embodied Others in Myanmar, 8. Moral Ambivalence in English Language Voluntourism, 9. Moral Lessons from a Storied Past in New York City, Section 3: Environmental Tourism Moralities, 10. On Decommodifying Ecotourism’s Social Value: Neoliberal Reformism or the New Environmental Morality?, 11. The Moralization of Flying: Cocktails in Seat 33G, Famine and Pestilence Below, 12. A Plutonium Tourism Ode: The Rocky Flats Cold War Museum, 13. Paying for Proximity: Touching the Moral Economy of Ecological Voluntourism, Section 4: Moral Methodologies, 14. Humanism and Tourism: A Moral Encounter, 15. Mind the Gap: Opening up Spaces of Multiple Moralities in Tourism Encounters, 16. What’s the ‘Use’ of Young Budget Travel?, 17. To Boldly Go Where No Van Has Gone Before: Auto-Ethnographic Experimentation and Mobile Fieldwork, Conclusion, 18. Conclusions: The Moral Conduct of Tourism Research, Index

Dr Mary Mostafanezhad is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and Kevin Hannam is Professor of Tourism Mobilities at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK.