Slow Tourism: Experiences and Mobilities

Bringing together scholars from the areas of tourism, leisure and cultural studies, eco-humanities and tourism management, this book examines the emerging phenomenon of slow tourism. The book explores the range of travel experiences that are part of growing consumer concerns with quality leisure time, environmental and cultural sustainability, as well as the embodied experience of place. Slow tourism encapsulates a range of lifestyle practices, mobilities and ethics that are connected to social movements such as slow food and cities, as well as specialist sectors such as ecotourism and voluntourism. The slow experience of temporality can evoke and incite different ways of being and moving, as well as different logics of desire that value travel experiences as forms of knowledge. Slow travel practices reflect a range of ethical-political positions that have yet to be critically explored in the academic literature despite the growth of industry discourse.

Simone Fullagar is an interdisciplinary sociologist who has published widely across the areas of health, leisure and tourism, using post-structuralist and feminist perspectives. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Tourism, Leisure, Hotel and Sport Management at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia.

Kevin Markwell is Associate Professor at the School of Business and Tourism, Southern Cross University, Australia. His research focuses on human-animal studies, tourist-nature relationships, wildlife tourism and gay tourism.

Erica Wilson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management at Southern Cross University. Erica teaches in the areas of sustainable tourism and special interest tourism, and her research publications reflect her scholarly interests in women’s travel and adventure, work-life balance, sustainable tourism and critical approaches to tourism research.