Cancelling March Madness exposes opportunities for a more sustainable sports tourism economy

Abstract

One of the earliest signals of the severity of the spread of COVID-19 in the United States and other countries was the swift cancelation of many highly prominent amateur and professional sporting events and seasons like the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, known as “March Madness.” The loss of March Madness is treated as a moment of creative tension, when disruptions can facilitate reflection and lead to positive change. We discuss the economic, socio-cultural, and environmental effects of shuttering the tournament and suggest that an understanding of the impacts of COVID-19 offers an opportunity to bring about an alternative, more sustainable sports tourism economy. The cancellation of March Madness resulted in the loss of millions of dollars in tourism revenue for local economies and deprived traveler-fans of pilgrimages to arenas, important socio-cultural gathering spaces for American basketball fans. However, it also prevented the emission of a sizable quantity of greenhouse gasses based on our carbon footprint calculated from the previous year’s tournament. Ultimately, from the disruptive closing down of sport and event tourism, a post-pandemic sports tourism landscape should emerge that takes more seriously the triple-bottom line notion of balancing a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions with the creation and maintenance of resilient local economies all while both acknowledging the important role sport plays in society and keeping tourism actors healthy.     

The Ins and Outs of Death in the Iron Age: Complex Funerary Treatments at Broxmouth Hillfort,East Lothian

Evidence for Iron Age funerary treatments remains sporadic across Britain and formal cemeteries are especially elusive. One important exception is Broxmouth hillfort, East Lothian, excavated during the late 1970s but not yet published. New analysis of the human remains from Broxmouth provides evidence for three distinct populations: a formal cemetery outside the hillfort, isolated graves within the ramparts, and a scatter of disarticulated fragments from a range of domestic and midden contexts. The latter group in particular provides significant evidence for violent trauma; isotopic evidence suggests that they may be the remains of outsiders. Together the human remains shed light on complex and changing attitudes to death and the human body in Iron Age Britain. The material from Broxmouth is considered in the light of emerging evidence for fluid and pluralistic treatments of the dead in the Iron Age of south‐east Scotland.     

“We can’t return to normal”: committing to tourism equity in the post-pandemic age

Abstract

Tourism transformation must bring an actionable focus on equity. A new normal openly recognizes the crises and tensions inhabiting tourism well before the COVID-19 pandemic along with the holistic and integrated nature of a pro-equity agenda. A resilient post-pandemic tourism must be more equitable and just, in terms of how it operates, its effects on people and place, and how we as scholars teach, study and publicly engage the travel industry—particularly in preparing its current and future leaders. A commitment to equity is about making specific changes in practices and decisions at multiple levels, along with growing a wider ethical framework. This pivot of a mindset requires us, as tourists, corporations, and educators to step away from a selfish perspective and critically change our perception and understanding of tourism to a truly equitable focus. Consequently, these actions force us to question the consumerism and capitalistic lens that has contributed to mass growth across the touristic landscape and instead, choose a system that fosters sustainable and equitable growth - which in turn, ‘slows down’ our ways of consuming the world around us - transforming our values and experiences of what tourism is and should be.     

The discourse of the past: phenomenology,structuralism and historical geography

Historical geography has to be predicated on a critical examination of past and present discourses, and this necessarily involves a rejection of positivist epistemology. This was, in more general terms, the basis of Husserl's critique, but two alternatives to this are the constitutive phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and the linguistic structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both present major difficulties. Schutz fails to recognize the necessity of a hermeneutic understanding of past societies and cannot account for the genesis and temporality of meaning, while Lévi-Strauss provides for a formalism which is directed towards the structure of the human mind rather than the historically specific structures of particular discourses. The connections and contrasts between these two positions suggest several ways in which the examination of discourse might be constituted in order to contribute to a structural history.     

TREGIFFIAN: THE CHRONOLOGY OF AN ENTRANCE GRAVE

The Tregiffian project involved the analysis and dating of the archive from unpublished excavations in the 1960s and 1970s at an entrance grave in Penwith, Cornwall. A major aim of the project was to establish a robust chronological basis for the use of the entrance grave for burial: 10 samples of cremated human bone were submitted for radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling undertaken. The modelling indicates that the use of the chamber for burial between began in 1780–1510 BC and ended in 1595–1425 BC. The results are hugely significant as they provide the first modelled dating from a Penwith entrance grave. This paper discusses the results from the radiocarbon dating project and reconsiders entrance graves in the wider context of the Early Bronze Age megalithic tombs which are found around the Irish Sea.