Study Guide

Objective

Students will get acquainted with a selected current issue in tourism.

Content

Current Issues in Tourism is a course module covering several different possibilities to gain ECTS. Courses are either face-to-face courses at the University of Lapland (registration in Peppi) or independent online courses (registration on the course website). Assignments for different courses vary and are informed in course descriptions. Also lectures (or seminar presentations, events e.g.) are held either at the university or online. Assignment for lectures is always the same: pre-reading, attending the lecture and writing a minimum three-page-long essay based on the lecture and relevant scientific literature. Detailed essay instructions are emailed by the responsible teacher in English and in Finnish.
Different possibilities are announced via email during fall and spring.

Some events are not always directly linked to tourism, but closely related, and you can emphasize tourism in your own essay.
If the emailed information is in English, the event will be in English, if the information is in Finnish, it will be in Finnish only. Submissions of assignments can be done in either language.

Further information

Course by Assistant Professor Andreja Trdina from University of Maribor.

Media culture and tourism

Course description

Given the saturation of the everyday by media technologies, the course Media culture and tourism provides an urgent understandings of both symbolic and material effects of media on our daily life. Grounded primarily within the sociology of culture and media studies, it sets out to clarify the manifold intersections between tourism and media in particular. After a short introduction on the development of contemporary media culture, the course approaches interrelations of media and tourism from three unique, yet related perspectives. Taking a) media texts, b) media effects, and c) media practices as its starting points, it aims to offer comprehensive account of the complex interplay between media and tourism today.

a) Tourist imagination and media texts.
Firstly, the course explores media representations as vital in the production of meaning and constructions of reality. It offers a conceptual apparatus to analyse media communication today, whilst exposing the ways in which selected media texts and genres relate to and structure tourist imagination (semiotics, representation, Hall's types of reading, Instagrammability trend, etc.).

b) Media audiences and popcultural tourism.
Furthermore, by offering first a short overview of media effects research the course discusses audiences and fandom, popcultural phenomena and media convergence, and specifically their role in fostering popcultural tourism (explaining also its basic principles on illustrative case studies).

c) New media practices and transformations of tourist experiences.
Finally, the course critically reflects on broader implications that digitalization, new media technologies, and mobile revolution have brought about for tourist practices and experiences of places (smartphone use and spillover effects, locative or geomedia and its effects on socio-spatial practices in tourism, etc.).

Completion

The aim of the Media culture and tourism course is to increase students' ability to critically reflect on the role of media today and evaluate its implications for tourist imagination, tourist practices, as well as tourist experiences.

Completing the course requires active participation and preparing for the lectures through assigned course-reading and short written assignments.

Evaluation scale

H-5

Assessment criteria, approved/failed

Fail: Performance is highly deficient or erroneous. The work may be based on misunderstandings.

Pass: Performance corresponds to the assignment, manifesting comprehension and a skill to analyse and argument..

Further information

The reponsible teacher will inform about different possibilities to gain Current Issues in Tourism via email. Detailed essay instruction will be attached in the email and also available upon request.