Abstract

Bringing together scholars from the areas of tourism, leisure and cultural studies, eco-humanities and tourism management, this book examines the emerging phenomenon of slow tourism. The book explores the range of travel experiences that are part of growing consumer concerns with quality leisure time, environmental and cultural sustainability, as well as the embodied experience of place. Slow tourism encapsulates a range of lifestyle practices, mobilities and ethics that are connected to social movements such as slow food and cities, as well as specialist sectors such as ecotourism and voluntourism. The slow experience of temporality can evoke and incite different ways of being and moving, as well as different logics of desire that value travel experiences as forms of knowledge. Slow travel practices reflect a range of ethical-political positions that have yet to be critically explored in the academic literature despite the growth of industry discourse.

This book's contributors pose a number of fascinating questions, particularly what do slow mobilities mean for tourism, do slow mobilities suggest different ways of engaging with people and place and do slow travel experiences lead us to connect with and understand the world differently? Their explorations are stimulating and thought-provoking. This is a book whose time has come; indeed its editors are ahead of the curve in assembling a collection of tourism-focused essays which challenge today's unrelenting and ultimately unsustainable pace of life. It makes for fascinating reading.

This edited collection is a timely and multidisciplinary contribution to an evolving concept. This volume is impressive in its scope and multiple perspectives, both theoretically and empirically. This book is one of the first to focus specifically on Slow Tourism and should be lauded for its multidisciplinary focus, contributions to theory, and empirical examples. The debates that this thought-provoking edition raises are also important.

Simone Fullagar is an interdisciplinary sociologist who has published widely across the areas of health, leisure and tourism, using post-structuralist and feminist perspectives. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Tourism, Leisure, Hotel and Sport Management at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia.

Kevin Markwell is Associate Professor at the School of Business and Tourism, Southern Cross University, Australia. His research focuses on human-animal studies, tourist-nature relationships, wildlife tourism and gay tourism.

Erica Wilson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management at Southern Cross University. Erica teaches in the areas of sustainable tourism and special interest tourism, and her research publications reflect her scholarly interests in women's travel and adventure, work-life balance, sustainable tourism and critical approaches to tourism research.

This book provides unique insights on slow tourism initiatives. It will offer good ideas to tourism students and academic researchers who are interested in conducting studies on various aspects of alternative tourism, because it is one of the very few available books on slow tourism for sustainability.

This book offers plentiful of remarks worthy for readers in tourism and hospitality, sociologists and mobilities-oriented academics. It presents a collected anthology of how ‘slow tourism’ can be studied from different perspectives while proposing how such movements might act out important roles in the development of more sustainable and ecofriendly tourism futures. This is an important and worthy call.

The present volume brings together a series of contributions on this as yet unexplored area of mobilities theory and practice. Coming from the fields of tourism, leisure and cultural studies, tourism management, and ecohumanities, the 17 contributors debate a range of relevant themes, including lifestyle mobilities and practices, travel ethics, leisure time, and cultural and environmental sustainability.

In this well researched collection of 17 chapters written by key scholars this book critically engages with the question: what do slow mobilities mean for tourism? Providing international case studies, multidisciplinary, philosophical and theoretical explorations, the book contributes timely, new and refreshing insights that should be read by anyone interested in the emerging phenomenon of slow travel.

One quality of this collection is its global reach, in which contributions from ‘‘down-under’’ bring a much needed diversity and enrichment to the literature. The editors fulfill their goal that ‘‘this collection will add to the body of knowledge concerning this emerging tourism phenomenon’’…This collection is to be commended for its conceptual debates and widening of the optic, and for its recognition that slow tourism is an emerging tourism phenomenon with genuine promise and potential. Commendably, there are several exceptional contributions to be found here.