Abstract

This chapter reviews work from what has been termed the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2004). The mobilities paradigm arguably allows us to place travel and tourism at the centre of social and cultural life rather than at the margins. Such tourism mobilities are often viewed as being bound up with both everyday, mundane journeys as well as the exotic encounters that have been the mainstay of much analysis in cultural tourism. The study of cultural tourism landscapes, meanwhile, has frequently privileged the visual in terms of the tourist gaze. Thus tourism landscapes have been ‘read’ as relatively ‘flat’ representations in much previous research. On the other hand, more recent research has engaged with new theories to argue that cultural tourism is experienced through tourists’ own bodies through diverse mobility practices involving new technologies.