Outi Rantala – författare

In A Research Agenda for Arctic Tourism, experts address key topics related to tourism in the North such as the climate crisis, increased political and economic turmoil, and the complexity of interests and relations among stakeholders. Suggesting potential pathways for research on Arctic tourism, the contributors recognize tourism as one future storyline for the Arctic: a storyline embedded in local human and non-human communities.Bringing in-depth and innovative scholarship together with creative thinking across tourism disciplines, this Research Agenda examines both the positive and negative effects of tourism development in the Arctic: from emerging new transport infrastructure and business, employment and economic opportunities to the impact on indigenous and local communities as well as nature. Experts in Northern tourism explore traditional business perspectives in tourism research with alternative theoretical approaches, highlighting communities and spatial relations. Scholars researching tourism management and tourism from social science perspectives, as well as Arctic studies more broadly, will appreciate the insights highlighted and the links to the wider topics of international relations, politics, sociology, geography and anthropology.

Featuring an international, multidisciplinary set of contributors, this thought-provoking book reimagines established narratives of the Anthropocene to allow differences in regions and contexts to be taken seriously, emphasising the importance of localised and situated knowledge.Envisaging a narrative of change that renders visible the complex transformations taking place across the globe, this book outlines new and radical ways to address the current environmental crisis in a more sustainable and context-specific manner. It presents empirical studies from various contexts, highlighting the potentiality of non-Western knowledge, concepts and categories as well as recognising the entanglement of humans with other beings and ecosystems. In particular, it offers critical engagement with the debates around the Anthropocene by challenging the dominant techno-rational agenda that often prevails in socio-political and academic discussions.This book will be crucial reading for researchers and post-graduate students working in fields from human geography and tourism studies to law, public policy and administration, philosophy, politics and organisation studies who are dealing with intersecting issues of environment, sustainability, indigenous rights, space and ethics. It will also be helpful for policy makers and research consultants in leveraging localised solutions to the current ecological crisis.

This open access book presents a series of speculative, experimental modes of inquiry in the present times of environmental damage that have come to be known as the age of the Anthropocene. Throughout the book authors develop more nuanced ways of engaging with the environmentally vulnerable Arctic. They counter distancing, exoticising, and even apocalyptic imaginaries of the Arctic by staying proximate with mundane places and beings of the north. The volume engages and plays with familiar tourism concepts, such as hospitality, visiting, difference, care, openness, and distance, while expanding the focus from binary and human-centric approaches of hosts and guests to questions of wellbeing among multispecies communities. The transdisciplinary group of contributors share a curiosity about how staying proximate may provide theoretical depth and epistemological openings to attend to current tensions and to diversify the ways we do and enact research. Thus, each chapter provides a methodological experiment with proximity, developing diverse ways of envisioning and storying more-than-human worlds.