Garth Lean

Travel and Representation is a timely volume of essays that explores and re-examines the various convergences between literature, art, photography, television, cinema and travel. The essays do so in a way that appreciates the entanglement of representations and travel at a juncture in theoretical work that recognizes the limits of representation, things that lie outside of representation and the continuing power of representation. The emphasis is on the myriad ways travelers/scholars employ representation in their writing/analyses as they re-think the intersections between travelers, fields of representation, imagination, emotions and corporeal experiences in the past, the present and the future.

“This is a collection of beautifully written chapters coalescing around a set of mutually illuminating themes: the visual, the poetic, imagination, the post-representational, travel, and self/world making. Moving from film to the Internet, from photography to music, and from travel writing and poetry to television commercials, Travel and Representation puts this debate over representation into terms that are amenable to tourism studies and research.” · Jennie Germann Molz, College of the Holy Cross

“This is an innovative collection of chapters that pushes the scope of research at the intersections between travel and representation in new directions by focusing on what representations ‘do’ in constructing the sensory and emotional experiences of travelers.” · Duncan Light, Bournemouth University

Travel and tourism have a long association with the notion of transformation, both in terms of self and social collectives. What is surprising, however, is that this association has, on the whole, remained relatively underexplored and unchallenged, with little in the way of a corpus of academic literature surrounding these themes. Instead, much of the literature to date has focused upon describing and categorising tourism and travel experiences from a supply-side perspective, with travellers themselves defined in terms of their motivations and interests. While the tourism field can lay claim to several significant milestone contributions, there have been few recent attempts at a rigorous re-theorization of the issues arising from the travel/transformation nexus. The opportunity to explore the socio-cultural dimensions of transformation through travel has thus far been missed.

Bringing together geographers, sociologists, cultural researchers, philosophers, anthropologists, visual researchers, literary scholars and heritage researchers, this volume explores what it means to transform through travel in a modern, mobile world. In doing so, it draws upon a wide variety of traveller perspectives - including tourists, backpackers, lifestyle travellers, migrants, refugees, nomads, walkers, writers, poets, virtual travellers and cosmetic surgery patients - to unpack a cultural phenomenon that has captured the imagination since the very first works of Western literature.

"'The imagination has long been associated with travel and tourism; from the seventeenth century when the showman and his peepshow box would take the village crowd to places, cities and lands through the power of stories, to today when we rely on a different range of boxes to whisk us away on our imaginative travels: the television, the cinema and the computer. Even simply the notion of travel, it would seem, gives us license to daydream. The imagination thus becomes a key concept that blurs the boundaries between our everyday lives and the idea of travel. Yet, despite what appears to be a close and comfortable link, there is an absence of scholarly material looking at travel and the imagination. 

Bringing together geographers, sociologists, cultural researchers, philosophers, anthropologists, visual researchers, archaeologists, heritage researchers, literary scholars and creative writers, this edited collection explores the socio-cultural phenomenon of imagination and travel. The volume reflects upon imagination in the context of many forms of physical and non-physical travel, inviting scholars to explore this fascinating, yet complex, area of inquiry in all of its wonderful colour, slipperiness, mystery and intrigue. The book intends to provide a catalyst for thinking, discussion, research and writing, with the vision of generating a cannon of scholarship on travel and the imagination that is currently absent from the literature.'"

The heightened inclination of tourists to engage in risk-taking behaviour and promiscuity is frequently documented in the tourism literature. There is still much to be learned, however, about how the app-facilitated, sexual encounters that characterise (hetero)sexual lives in a mobile, digital world are becoming a part of tourists’ expected and desired tourism experiences. This chapter draws upon qualitative data from tourists who use the Location Aware dating application (app) Tinder, alongside a critical examination of Tinder’s User Interface (UI) and User Experience Design (UXD), to unravel the complexities of the ‘Tinder Tourist’ and the gamified ‘hook-up’ app that both drives and satiates their quest for sexual experiences abroad. Tinder Tourism is a phenomenon which can reveal much about travel and problematic power relations in digitally-mediated times.

This chapter takes the position that people, technology and place are intimately and materially entangled in performances of Tinder, the popular location-aware mobile application (app) designed primarily (but not necessarily) for dating. We draw upon personal experiences of using Tinder (mainly in Australian and European contexts) and the experiences of our research participants who have used Tinder and other location-aware apps (e.g. Backpackr, Grindr, and Couch Surfer) while travelling across the world to consider ontological, epistemological and methodological issues of researching the 'digital'. We use new materialist concepts, ideas, theories and approaches to reconsider our approach to researching the use location-aware social apps during travel, a research focus that stemmed from our own personal observations of witnessing many travellers on Tinder given our location in the popular travel destination of Sydney, Australia. Our main research methods are the usual suspects: an online qualitative survey and qualitative interviews. But we had essentially 'swiped [ourselves] right' into researching screened and technologically-mediated travel experiences in times of the 'mobile' and the 'digital'. Messy and muddled, complex and consuming, Tinder is completely inseperable from the people who use it. Without us, there is no Tinder. We therefore want to orientate towards the question: what we are becoming with Tinder? And how do our methods need to change in order to capture the intra-activity of human-technology-place relations? When the 'field' is an app on your phone that is in your hand, in your home and every place else you go, the rules of research need rewriting.

This chapter explores the ethical complexities of researching location-aware social discovery Smartphone applications (apps) and how they mediate contemporary experiences of travel. We highlight the context-specific approach required to carrying out research on Tinder, a location-aware app that enables people to connect with others in close proximity to them. By journeying through the early stages of our research project, we demonstrate how ethical considerations and dilemmas began long before our project became a project. We discuss the pulls toward data extraction/mining of user-generated content (i.e., Tinder user profiles) within digital social research and the ethical challenges of using this data for research purposes. We focus particularly on issues of informed consent, privacy, and copyright, and the differences between manual and automated data mining/extraction techniques. Excerpts from our university ethics application are included to demonstrate how our research sits uneasily within standardized ethical protocols. Our moves away from a “big data” approach to more “traditional” and participatory methodologies are located within questions of epistemology and ontology including our commitment to practising a feminist research ethic. Our chapter concludes with the lessons learned in the aim to push forward with research in challenging online spaces and with new data sources.

Western Sydney’s population is rapidly expanding and increasingly mobile. It is projected that, by 2036, Greater Sydney will be home to six million people with over three million residing in Western Sydney. The Federal Government anticipates the new Western Sydney Airport will welcome five million passengers in its first year of operation (2026), and 37 million passengers per annum by 2050. At the same time, everyday life is increasingly mediated by digital technologies, which will only become more embedded with people and place in the future.

More people visiting, living and working in Western Sydney presents opportunities and challenges for travel and transport stakeholders in Western Sydney. Population increases coupled with higher residential densities puts pressure on existing transport infrastructures and networks. Rapid change also has implications for the quality of life and wellbeing of Western Sydney’s residents. New digital technologies and services are being developed to provide transit solutions, but they present challenges for existing governance structures and emerging travel cultures.

Technology will shape the future of travel and transport and people will respond in varied ways. Governments, industry, start-ups, planners, developers, researchers and communities are working to ensure that travel infrastructures, networks and technologies cater for mobile lives. For Australia’s third largest economy to become a vibrant, diverse and prosperous region, those moving in Western Sydney, whether it be for work, education or leisure, must have an experience that encourages their continued investment in its development; both financially and emotionally. Strategic planning initiatives and policies that shape smarter transport infrastructures need to ensure that Western Sydney becomes a productive, liveable and sustainable place to live, work, play and stay.

This green paper presents five significant themes that cover pertinent issues for Western Sydney’s digital travel futures: ensuring equitable mobilities, adapting to change and disruption, co-creating digital tourism experiences, new travel technologies, and securing the mobile city. Each theme presents catalyst questions to stimulate discussion and research.

How school teachers act to challenge racism in schools is a vital concern in an immigrant society like Australia. A 10% response from a self-administered online survey of government (public) primary and secondary school teachers across Sydney, Australia’s largest EthniCity, examines attitudes of classroom teachers towards cultural diversity, goals of multicultural education, and strategies to implement anti-racist strategies. Principal components analysis (PCA) of attitudes tease out the varied influence of opinion on multicultural education, diversity, and anti-racism. Classroom teachers are overwhelmingly supportive of cultural diversity, multicultural education and strategies to combat racism and discrimination, and these views hardly vary across the different geographic zones of the city, unlike attitudes within the general community. However, teacher knowledge about the implementation of multicultural policy does vary, and is positively associated with the extent of population diversity and socio-economic status (SES) of the communities surrounding the schools.

This article reports on the first comprehensive survey of public school teachers in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) around issues of multicultural and English as Second Language (ESL) education. While there is substantial literature on multicultural education – what it should and shouldn’t be – there is much that is left unexplored in research in the area, not least of which is the characteristics of the teaching labour force. In this article, we ‘take stock’ of multicultural education, not by engaging with philosophical debates about multiculturalism as an ethical or policy practice, but as an auditing of what exists in the name of multicultural education. Drawing on a sample of over 5000 respondents, the article documents the changing cultural profile of the profession and highlights gaps in pre-service training and professional learning of teachers in terms of meeting the needs of Australia’s increasingly culturally and linguistically complex school populations.

This paper draws upon the findings of an online survey of all public school teachers in New South Wales around issues of multiculturalism and multicultural education (May–June 2011; completed sample of n=5,128). The survey showed an encouraging trend among teachers to be pro-diversity, suggesting a widely held openness to cultural difference. It also found that teachers are supportive of multicultural education and strongly support anti-racism in schools. Teachers, however, were less likely than the general population to acknowledge racism as a problem in Australian society, and only half agreed that racism was a problem in schools. Executive staff were even less likely to acknowledge there was a problem with racism in schools or in Australian society more broadly. The survey also found that classroom teachers were much less likely to have read Departmental policies on multicultural education and anti-racism than were executive staff, though this is to be expected given the latter’s requirement to report on the operationalisation of departmental policy. While teachers seemed to have a more extensive view of the presence of racism than executive staff they displayed less awareness of their own schools’ implementation of policies of anti-racism and multicultural education. Compared to teachers at the chalkface, school leaders tend to under-acknowledge racism and overestimate the effects of anti-racism. Together these findings indicate a problematic disjuncture within the professional practice of schooling, and a source of disruption to the delivery of multicultural education programs.

This report provides insights into the current practices of multicultural education and the opinions and understandings of New South Wales (NSW) public school teachers around increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in schools and the broader Australian community. The report is the outcome of the first stage of the Rethinking Multiculturalism/ Reassessing Multicultural Education (RMRME) Project, a three-year Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project between the University of Western Sydney, the NSW Department of Education and Communities (DEC) and the NSW Institute of Teachers. The survey was conducted in Term 2, 2011. All permanent teaching and executive staff in NSW public schools were invited to participate through their departmental emails. With 5,128 responses, the survey yielded a response rate of just under 10 per cent, providing, for the first time, a rich source of data on NSW DEC teachers and schools around issues of multicultural education and multiculturalism. The survey responses show both a strong commitment amongst teachers to multiculturalism as a broad principle, and to the range of programs and practices aimed at addressing issues around equity and social justice, English language proficiency, intercultural understanding and racism in schools and society more broadly. The survey also reveals both significant commonalities and differences in teachers’ professional and teaching experience, and commonalities and differences in attitudes: to cultural diversity and how it informs school communities, to students and parents within those communities, and to educational practices and the goals of multiculturalism. These commonalities and differences are examined in the context of various factors such as: the diversity of the school context, the experience and position of teachers, whether they are in regional or Sydney metropolitan schools, secondary or primary. The survey also draws attention to critical issues in teaching practices – limited awareness of departmental policies, divergent understandings of multiculturalism and associated key ideas, varying responses to the needs of students and contrasting views about the causes of educational success and failure of LBOTE students.