Netflix: Canadian (Dis)Content. Competing Sovereignties and the Cultural Politics of Cultural Policy

Netflix has gained significant attention in Canada because it exemplifies the challenge posed by digital technology to Canada’s long-standing cultural policies. It is increasingly evident that such policies are limited in their ability to encourage foreign investment while safeguarding Canadian cultural expression. Indeed, the policies proposed thus far have generated “Canadian discontent” across the political spectrum, notwithstanding their promised benefits. This article uses Netflix to explore the cultural politics of cultural policy: the historical and political underpinnings that drive ongoing discussions about state intervention in culture. These politics include the debates about the effect of foreign investment on Canadian cultural sovereignty, and the ideological tensions within the notion of sovereignty itself, namely those between state and consumer and between center and periphery. Using a historiographical approach, this article investigates the controversy surrounding recent government responses to the disruptive force of foreign digital multinationals, such as Netflix.     

(Re)constructing borders through the governance of tourism and trade in Ladakh,India

This paper analyses how everyday life, the state and nationhood are regulated and organised in a conflict-affected borderland space through economic activities. It focuses on two elements that are often overlooked when scholars discuss spatial governmentality: tourism and trade. Both are commonly declared to be elements of peace, peacebuilding and cosmopolitism. However, the spatial governance of tourism and trade can also profoundly shape how national belonging and the limits of territory are perceived and experienced by borderland populations and visitors. These dynamics can be acute in conflict-affected border zones, where state sovereignty may be under existential or territorial threat. This paper exposes such dynamics in the Indian conflict borderland area of Ladakh, a part of Jammu and Kashmir State until October 2019. Building on scholarship that has analysed cultural and social dynamics of “bordering” in the region, this paper argues that it is possible to read (socio-)economic boundary-making in Ladakh through the state's influence in the organisation and experience of trade and tourism for Ladakhis and visitors. The paper highlights how their spatial organisation, in part, underwrites difference and separation, and aids in framing the contested territory as ‘Indian’.     

Passing as a tourist: Exploring the everyday urban geopolitics of tourism

This paper presents a case study of territorial boundary transgression and intergroup encounters mediated by tourism in a volatile and contested urban space. I present the notion of ‘passing as a tourist’ as a prism to investigate the nexus between performative tourism and everyday urban geopolitics. Situated in East Jerusalem's core geographies of colonization and political violence, this paper uses archival news material and a textual analysis of primary questionnaire data to critically examine how Jewish Israeli Jerusalemites visiting the Muslim Quarter in the Old City negotiate encounters in a conflicted space. The study reveals how the performative dimensions of ‘tourism’ in a context of polarized ethnonational division expose the role of embodied, everyday geopolitics in the production of urban spaces of tourism.     

Visitors’ place-based evaluations of unacceptable tourism impacts in Oulanka National Park,Finland

Visitors’ assessments of the negative impact of tourism, on physical and social environment, vary based on the location where the evaluation occurs. Research that focuses on identifying visitors’ norms within outdoor recreation settings has not been able to link the geographical location with the corresponding evaluation of unacceptable levels of impact. This study combines a traditional on-site visitor survey with a Public Participation Geographic Information Systems survey to produce spatially explicit information on visitors’ acceptance of tourism impacts. Using a web-based participatory survey, visitors were asked to indicate specific locations where they felt the effects of tourism disturbed the quality of their experience in Oulanka National Park. These evaluations were analyzed at multiple scales – destination, specific zones, and sites – to promote more efficient park management. Based on visitor evaluations, we found a collection of hotspots in the park where tourism has already caused unacceptable impacts. Visitors noted that crowding and erosion disturbed their experiences, especially along highly visited trail sections, while littering was considered problematic near wilderness huts. However, participant satisfaction at these sites was not lower than elsewhere in the park. This indicates that the association between negative impacts of tourism and visitor satisfaction is not straightforward, but complex. This study encourages the collection of spatially accurate data on visitors’ assessments of the effects of tourism because it has the potential to more efficiently direct park management policies. In addition, spatial techniques provide a new means to monitor the impacts of tourism, acknowledging that visitors’ perceptions of acceptability of tourism impacts also vary within tourism destinations, such as parks.     

Tourism global production networks and uneven social upgrading in Kenya and Uganda

This paper addresses how the growth of tourism global production networks (GPNs) based in Kenya and Uganda created uneven social upgrading outcomes for workers and communities. A tourism GPN and social upgrading framework follows a global political economy approach to analyzing tourism development and labor in diverse tourism geographies. Two tourism GPNs are investigated: Mombasa, Kenya, and Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda. Four main findings emerge: (1) governance relationships between tour operator and accommodation firms directly impacted social upgrading outcomes for hotel workers and indirectly for excursion workers; (2) excursion workers and community members had precarious connections to tourism GPNs; (3) public governance and collective power were key components to social upgrading while supporting its unevenness; and (4) societal embeddedness constructions around gender and regional space influenced worker and community social upgrading potential. Social upgrading is shaped by a confluence of firm, institution, geography, and labor conditions that differentially materializes in specific tourism GPN arrangements.     

Disappearing culture? Globalisation and a Canary Island fishing community

This article looks at a Canary Island fishing community, examining its interactions with global processes that are seen as part of a development stretching back to the first Spanish colonisers. The focus is on recent events including tourism, and the article depicts the fishing culture and analyses whether such a thing can be said to be disappearing. It is argued that the indigenous individuals, foreign settlers and tourists involved are all active agents in the globalisation process. Furthermore, the particular type of tourism has specific influences that are broad and deep and impact on the local economy, gender roles, relationships, and attitudes towards the environment and business strategies. The identity of the village is also examined and found to retain its links with fishing. However, some elements of the local culture are certainly disappearing. Although in contrast, other elements have been strengthened by global processes.     

Evaluating inputs to models of hominin raw material selection: map resolution and path choices

Selection of an appropriate scale is an important decision in study design in many branches of science, since perceived patterns often change with the scales of spatial extent or resolution of an analysis. In previously published work, we created a resource selection model to determine the importance of several independent variables for the selection of lithic materials by hominins at a Middle Palaeolithic site in southern France. Two of these independent variables (calories exerted and difficulty of the terrain covered in travel from source to site) were calculated using elevation data extracted from maps. In the present paper, we examine the differences in model performance when the variables ‘Calories’ and ‘Difficulty’ are calculated using 1) three base maps for elevation that differed in map resolution (from finest to coarsest: a 1:25,000 topographic base map, SPOT DEM, and SRTM DEM), and 2) two different methods for determining the route from source to site (straight-line route and least-cost route; both methods exclude areas with slopes >60% from travel). Our best model was the one that used data calculated using the topographic base map; however, the SRTM DEM-based data produced models of essentially equal quality. Regardless of map scale, models that used data calculated using a straight-line route always outperformed models that used data calculated using a least-cost route. This supports our previous finding that a straight-line route is a more appropriate measure for the path from lithic source to site than a least-cost route. We conclude that the map resolution of each of the base maps used here is appropriate for analyses involving spatial data pertaining to Neandertal activity because this type of data is essentially always coarse-grained.     

Latest developments in rock art recording: towards an integral documentation of Levantine rock art sites combining 2D and 3D recording techniques

This paper presents a further step in the integral documentation of prehistoric rock art, combining 2D and 3D digital recording techniques. Image processing and digital enhancement techniques are an invaluable aid to obtain high quality and accurate 2D recordings, especially when working with faint motifs or complex superimpositions. But what constitutes a real breakthrough is the possibility of combining 2D digital tracings with metric 3D models, providing a whole set of metric outputs that improve our understanding of the motifs in their context and, at the same time, can be used to deliver accurate metric reproductions.     

An Incomplete History of Interpretation from the Big Bang

Interpretation/guiding has been recorded as a profession as far back as 2500 BP. It has left a legacy, sometimes positive, sometimes negative; a legacy of pride in place and the importance of passing on heritage to the local community and the tourist. This paper covers some highlights of the period from the time of Herodotus to the present. There is much more to discover and record; this is a beginning.