Making Academic Research Meaningful for the Real World

TOURISM GEOGRAPHIC — A New Medium Publication

A New and Different Travel & Tourism Publication on Medium.

Tourism Geographic is a new Medium publication with the goal of making academic research on travel and tourism more accessible to general readers.

Academic articles can be challenging to read because of the specialized terminology (“jargon”) and rigid writing structure (like a formal “literature review”) that is often imposed on authors.

Indeed, it can be challenging for most readers to see the value and importance of what the authors have discovered in their research — if they can even see the research due to the paid subscription model of academic publishing.

Tourism Geographic hopes to overcome these shortcoming, at least in the field of travel tourism studies. We take a human geography perspective, which is fairly broad in scope, but focusing mostly on tourism places and experiences (think National Geographic).

Here are some of our initial articles (they are all paywall free):

• Tourism, Power & the Value of Place in Pisca, Peru Who owns Latin America’s plazas after the tourists arrive? — by Rosa Codina, Peter Lugosi, & David Bowen
• How Elephants Pay for School Fees: Wildlife Tourism in The Zambezi Region Namibia’s conservancy policies help communities, but challenges remain — by Linus Kalvelage, Javier Revilla Diez, & Michael Bollig
• Conflicted Histories and Dark Heritage in Kazakhstan’s Gulags Soviet Era Legacy is Leaving Lasting Memories — by Guillaume Tiberghien & J. John Lennon
• The Power of Religious Pilgrimage in India Thriving economies based on beliefs, rituals, deities, social norms, and the spirit of place — by Kiran Shinde
• We Travel Because It Expands Our Global Consciousness Like any other drug, international travel alters our mind in desirable ways — by Alan A. Lew

We generally do not include business and management-oriented approaches to tourism studies, which is a big subject area in itself, but not in our focus. We especially want to publish articles that will capture the interests of a broad spectrum of academic and non-academic readers across the globe. That is what geography is all about!

Please note that for the time being, we are only showcasing articles based on research published by scholars in our academic sister journal, Tourism Geographies (published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis, UK). We will most like revise this policy in the future, once we are more established.

In the meantime,

We invite Medium readers who are interested in the World of Travel and Tourism to follow to Tourism Geographic.

For more about Tourism Geographic, including our Managing Editors, see the Welcome and Guidelines article on the publications main page.