On the Move: Problems and Histories of Tourism and Mobilities

Catalog description

This course examines histories of modern recreational tourism and the politics of mobility more generally. Tourism is a fascinating point of departure through which we can examine how histories of empire, consumerism, gender, and the environment all converge upon practices many (but certainly not all) of us take for granted. The premise of this seminar is based on two basic questions: through tourism, how do we change a place and how does that place change us? How does human mobility produce a new set of economic, social, and political relations? The answers will vary across time and space, but through engagement with scholarship and various primary sources we can come to better understand how the pleasure modern-day travelers derive from temporarily being someplace else is ultimately something deeply embedded into the structures and historical processes of the modern world itself.