Complex Engagement
University of Granada
Storytelling in Heritage Tourism: Exploring Stories’ Effects of Visitor Immersion in Small Scale Museums View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ana Cláudia Campos
Heritage attractions’ managers must acknowledge that today’s tourists want to connect with heritage at a deeper and mindful level. Stories communicate a community’s history and culture and storytelling is considered a co-creative tool that increases visitor engagement with the local community’s heritage and leads to meaningful and memorable tourist experiences. Storytelling is an innovative and effective way to co-create experiences that transport tourists to the history and culture of the local community. However, a lack of knowledge exists regarding storytelling’s implementation and effects in heritage tourism settings. This research delves into these issues and analyses an example of how storytelling types combine in a heritage experience context. A storytelling tour with three independent groups of participants was performed at a small-scale museum, the Islamic Museum of Tavira, Portugal. Then, participants were invited to take part in focus groups to share their thoughts on the experience at the museum. Data were analysed with reflexive thematic analysis. Findings point to the importance of stories in the museum experience context, highlighting their innovative contribution for visitors to immerse in the local community’s history and culture. Additionally, this research proposes an emergent conceptual framework on storytelling implementation in small-scale heritage museums.
Polyscopic Spectatorship, Creative Cartography, and Post-Cinematic Refractions in the Age of Neo-Liberal Travel: An Investigation of Youtube Travel Vloggers View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Niko Doezema
One of the most popular forms of travel "literature" consumed today is the travel-vlog. YouTube is awash in these travelers, the most successful of which even make a career out of their travels through monetization of their content, allowing them to pay for traveling by traveling. My project is a three-fold investigation into the nature of this genre, the first two branches of which are genealogical and diagnostic, the third of which is speculative and potentially transformative. My first inquiry examines the historical and generic conditions at the crossroads of travel literature and empire that have led to the present moment as well as the ideological implications of the representations that arise from this convergence. My second critical framework develops on the "post-cinematic" medium itself, namely its spatial and temporal representations by/of its subjects, as well as the social and economic network on which it operates. Drawing on critical approaches to cartography (read here as spatiotemporal translation at large), I pivot to an analysis which takes into account a potentially oppositional reading of this genre resulting from an unstable "polyscopic" spectatorship emanating from a refracted multiplicity of gazes transmitted to/from the primary spectator (the traveler/creator) and the secondary spectators (the viewers/consumers as well as ethnographic/anthropological subjects). Through a close reading of several vloggers, I ultimately ask whether this potential modality can ever be realized within the confines of a genre characterized by shallow cosmopolitanism, a commodification of destination, and the fabrication of parasocial intimacy.
Self-efficacy, Awareness of Need and Global Citizenship as Drivers of the Intention to Participate in Volunteer Tourism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Beatrice Avolio
During the last decade, volunteer tourism has flourished as a popular alternative to traditional tourism, as evidenced by the growing number of organizations and participants worldwide. However, very little is known about volunteer tourists’ behavior. The aim of this study is to strengthen knowledge of the behavioral intention of volunteer tourists and analyze the drivers that influence the intention to participate in volunteer tourism. Using a quantitative approach, based on a review of the academic discussion on the subject, a model was designed that included self-efficacy, awareness of need and global citizenship within the framework of the Theory of Planned Behavior to analyze the behavioral intention of volunteer tourists. The structural equation modelling technique was applied to the results of a survey answered by 235 volunteer tourists. In addition, the mediation and moderation analyses were applied to evaluate the effect of global citizenship and awareness of need on the behavioral intention of volunteer tourists. The results confirm that the Theory of Planned Behavior, replacing perceived behavioral control with self-efficacy, is adequate to explain the intention to carry out volunteer tourism. In addition, awareness of need moderated the relationship between self-efficacy and subjective norms with respect to the behavioral intention to engage in volunteer tourism, separately. Finally, attitudes fully mediated the relationship between global citizenship and the intention to carry out volunteer tourism. The originality of this study lies in being the first to quantitatively integrate global citizenship into a model that analyzes the behavioral intention of volunteer tourists.
