ABSTRACT
Tourism Studies appears to be increasingly divided between the unquestioning embrace of the market, on the one hand, and questions of discourse, culture, and representation on the other. The emergence and prominence of cultural analyses in tourism is the result of the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences (in particular, human geography and sociology) and greater engagement with poststructuralist theory in Leisure and Tourism Studies (see Aitchison et al. , 2000; Aitchison, 2006; Ateljevic et al. , 2005, 2007b; Crouch, 1999; Rojek and Urry, 1997; Rojek, 2000; also Gale in Chapter 4 of this volume), which in turn has stimulated the emergence of a new ‘sub-discipline of Critical Tourism Studies’ (CTS) (Aitchison, 2001). The ‘critical turn’ seeks to address both leisure and tourism as ‘predominantly cultural phenomena’ (Aitchison, 2006: 419), through critical interrogation of the myriad discourses, images and representations embedded within contemporary tourism practices.
