Accessible Tourism Research

The blog seeks to present a brief history of accessible tourism through reviewing key documents and presenting new research as it is published. Central to the examination of the history of the field and contemporary innovation, is an understanding that accessible tourism is complex, multilayered and involves stakeholders from the commercial, government and the third sectors. Solutions need to be developed through collaboration and understanding stakeholder perspectives.

Showing posts with label health. Show all posts

Saturday, May 4, 2019

An important area for the future of accessible tourism research: Why Social Sustainability is a Foreign Concept in Relation to Disability?

This article is a theoretically driven piece which tracks the development of social sustainability. The focus is on where people with disability fit in the discussion of social sustainability. A conversation like this is very important for accessible tourism because too often our access to all areas of social participation is restricted for no other reason but being overlooked, omitted or 'othered' due to poor planning, a lack of consideration or deliberate exclusion that constitutes both indirect and direct discrimination by those charged with all levels of decision-making.

Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V.All rights reserved.

Social Sustainability and Its Indicators through a Disability Studies and an Ability Studies Lens

Gregor Wolbring

Theresa Rybchinski

Abstract

The present journal recently stated in the call for a special issue on social sustainability, “[t]hough sustainable development is said to rest on ‘three pillars’, one of these—social sustainability—has received significantly less attention than its bio-physical environmental and economic counterparts”. The current issue promises to engage the concepts of “development sustainability”, “bridge sustainability” and “maintenance sustainability” and the tensions between these different aspects of social sustainability. The aim of the present study is to identify the visibility of disabled people in the academic social sustainability literature, to ascertain the impact and promises of social sustainability indicators put forward in the same literature and to engage especially with the concepts of “development sustainability”, “bridge sustainability” and “maintenance sustainability” through disability studies and ability studies lenses. We report that disabled people are barely covered in the academic social sustainability literature; of the 5165 academic articles investigated only 26 had content related to disabled people and social sustainability. We also conclude that social sustainability indicators evident in the 1909 academic articles with the phrase “social sustainability” in the abstract mostly focused on products and did not reflect yet the goals outlined in the “development sustainability” aspect of social sustainability proposed by Vallance such as basic needs, building social capital, justice and so on. We posit that if the focus within the social sustainability discourse shifts more toward the social that an active presence of disabled people in this discourse is essential to disabled people. We showcase the utility of an ability studies lens to further the development and application of the “development sustainability”, “bridge sustainability” and “maintenance sustainability”concepts. We outline how different ability expectations intrinsic to certain schools of thought of how to deal with human-nature relationships (for example anthropocentric versus bio/ecocentric) impact this relationship and “bridge sustainability”. As to “maintenance development”, we posit that no engagement has happened yet with the ability expectation conflicts between able-bodied and disabled people, or for that matter with the ability expectation differences between different able-bodied groups within social sustainability discourses; an analysis essential for the maintenance of development. In general, we argue that there is a need to generate ability expectation conflict maps and ability expectations conflict resolution mechanisms for all sustainable development discourses individually and for ability conflicts between sustainable development discourses.

Keywords: social sustainability; disabled people; people with disabilities; disability studies; indicators; social determinants of health; ability studies

Full reference:

Wolbring, G., &; Rybchinski, T. (2013). Social Sustainability and Its Indicators through a Disability Studies and an Ability Studies Lens. Sustainability, 5(11), 4889-4907.

www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability

For further information on the paper please contact:

Gregor Wolbring
University of Calgary
3330 Hospital Drive
NW, Calgary, Alberta T2N4N1, Canada
gwolbrin@ucalgary.ca

Photo 1: Social sustainability for some groups of people with mobility disability is as simple as a continuous pathway of access to reach points of visual interest or cultural heritage © Bruce Cameron, Simon Darcy and Easy Access Australia

Monday, June 2, 2014

German Research Shows That Holidays Enhance Life Satisfaction of PwD

Drawing on data from Germany, this study finds that in many ways, holidays have a more positive effect on people with disability than they do on people without disability.

The Impact of Holiday Trips on Life Satisfaction and Domains of Life Satisfaction: Evidence for German Disabled Individuals

Ricardo Pagán

Abstract

This study analyses the contribution of holiday trips to the levels of life satisfaction reported by individuals with and without disability by using an approach in which life satisfaction is seen as a combination of various life satisfaction domains (health, job, housework, household income, dwelling, and leisure). Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate a two-layer model which proposes that satisfaction with different domains of life are interrelated and wherein life satisfaction depends on the weight that the individual allocates to each of these domains. The results show that disabled people who participate in holiday trips obtain higher levels of satisfaction with health, job, and housework than do nondisabled ones, especially when this participation is more intense. In addition, satisfaction with health and household income has a significant effect on the overall life satisfaction reported by disabled individuals. Public policy recommendations are given.

Keywords: holiday trips, life satisfaction, domains of life satisfaction, disability, Germany

Full reference:

Pagán, R., 2014, 'The impact of holiday trips on life satisfaction and domains of life satisfaction: Evidence for German disabled individuals', Journal of Travel Research, DOI: 10.1177/0047287513517424.

http://jtr.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/01/08/0047287513517424.abstract

For further information on the paper please contact:

Ricardo Pagán
Applied Economics Department, University of Malaga
Plaza de El Ejido s/n, Malaga, 29.071, Spain
Email: rpr@uma.es

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Wellness Tourism, Women and Mental Health

Small & Darcy (2010, p. 8) report on Australian National Visitor Survey figures that show that people with mental health issues report the lowest level of tourism participation of any group of people with disabilities. Yet, very little work has investigated the impact of mental health on tourism or the impact of tourism on mental health. Simone Fullagar (2011) presents an insightful chapter titled, Travelling with and Beyond Depression: Women’s Narratives of Recovery and Identity, which connects the growing body of work on wellness tourism to the well-developed work on women, disability studies, leisure studies and mental health. Tourism has had a long history of being identified as having connections to wellness, recovery and restoration where a break from our everyday lives provides a space in which we can recreate ourselves. Landscapes are the focus of many tourism experiences and Photo 1 presents an image of the beach, which has been long associated with a relaxing and restorative environment.

Simone's chapter resonated with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's radio program Life Matters on the 22^nd March 2011 and the interview can be listened to as a podcast on the following link.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lifematters/stories/2011/3169522.htm

The reference to this article as well as an extract of the introduction is now presented.

Fullagar, S. (2011). Chapter 7 - Travelling with and Beyond Depression: Women’s Naratives of Recovery and Identity. In D. Buhalis & S. Darcy (Eds.), Accessible Tourism: Concepts and Issues (pp. 123-137). Bristol, UK: Channel View Publications.

Copyright © 2010 Channelview publications. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Despite the growing prevalence and variety of mental health ‘problems’ within contemporary societies there has been surprisingly little exploration of the relationship between emotional distress/wellbeing and tourism experiences. This chapter aims to contribute a feminist perspective to the growing body of research into ‘wellness tourism’ (Smith & Kelly, 2006) through a focus on travel within Australian women’s narratives of recovery from depression. Hence, it builds upon the expanding literature on women travellers (J Small, 1999; Tiyce, 2008; Wearing & Wearing, 1996; Wilson & Harris, 2006) by developing closer connections with work in disability studies, leisure studies and mental health (Fullagar, 2008; Fullagar & Brown, 2003; Kleiber, Hutchinson, & Williams, 2002; Stoppard, 2000). In particular I consider how meaningful travel experiences figured within women’s stories of moving through depression and renegotiating their sense of self in recovery (Wilson & Harris, 2006). In this way I explore a tension shaping the travel experience between understanding the ‘disabling effects’ of being diagnosed as mentally ‘ill’ as well as the transformative possibilities travel affords women.

In this chapter I argue that the liminal space of travel affords us another way of understanding the relational and multiple nature of women’s identity. Travel involves the movement away from home with its gendered responsibilities and expectations, as well as the movement towards other worlds and possible selves experienced within a relation to difference. In particular I focus on 11 narratives that identified the significance of travel within an Australian Research Council funded qualitative study involving 80 Australian women aged 20-75 who self-identified as recovering from depression. Ten women who identified themselves as travellers or tourists spoke of the embodied longing to move through places that gave them hope, desire and the vitality to escape the weight of depression. In contrast one woman spoke of how travel actually contributed to her depression rather than recovery. My analysis considers how women draw upon gendered discourses to articulate their recovering identity and identified three interrelated themes about travel experiences. These themes include; travel as a narrative of escape from gendered expectations of home, travel as a pleasurable form of risk taking and travel as a quest for a purposeful identity beyond deficit and depression.

Mental health and illness are also ‘liminal’ categories of human experience that have been culturally produced through the oppositional relations of the mind and body, reason and emotion, healthy and sick, normal and abnormal, self and other (Ussher, 1991; Wiener, 2005). In this context I explore how travel and tourism figure in the stories of those who are living with and moving through an identity formed around depression and gender. I conclude with a reflection upon the implications of the study for the fields of tourism and mental health with respect to ways of thinking about wellbeing.

To read the chapter please see,

References

Fullagar, S. (2008). Leisure practices as counter-depressants. Leisure Sciences(1), 1-18.

Fullagar, S., & Brown, P. (2003). Everyday temporalities: Leisure, ethics and young women's emotional well-being. Annals of Leisure Research, 6(3), 193-208.

Kleiber, D., Hutchinson, S., & Williams, R. (2002). Leisure as a resource in transcending negative life events: Self-protection, self-restoration and personal transformation. Leisure Sciences, 24(2), 219 - 235.

Small, J. (1999). Memory-work: a method for researching women's tourist experiences. Tourism Management, 20, 25-35.

Small, J., & Darcy, S. (2010). Tourism, Disability and Mobility. In S. Cole & N. Morgan (Eds.), Tourism and Inequality: Problems and Prospects (pp. 1-20). Wallingford: CABI.

Smith, M., & Kelly, C. (2006). Wellness tourism. Tourism Recreation Research, 31(1), 1-4.

Stoppard, J. (2000). Understanding depression: Feminist social constructionist approaches. London: Routledge.

Tiyce, M. (2008). Healing through travel: Two women's experiences of loss and adaptation. Paper presented at the Where the bloody hell are we? Cauthe, Gold Coast.

Ussher, J. (1991). Women's madness: Misogyny or mental illness? New York: Havester Wheatsheaf.

Wearing, B., & Wearing, S. (1996). Refocussing the tourist experience: The flaneur and the choraster. Leisure Studies, 15(4), 229-243.