Catalogue of questions
This list is based on the personal interests of the director of the project.
It should only be seen as a suggestion not as a requirement.
1.regime of point of view and production of desire
-How are the desires of tourists created and dealt with?
-What is made visible in the regimes of the point of view, what stays invisible?
-Which were and are the dominant media of the tourist image production? Is there an image production that also looks behind the scenery, illuminates the backstage area?
-How and why have the worlds of image that are used in tourism commercials changed?
-How has tourism developed further from a postcolonial perspective? How has it developed at all?
2.Actors and social spaces
-Who and what are the common and different actors, motives, motivations, and particularities in tourism, work migration and compulsory migration?
-Which special forms of socialization and living communities start to exist in the context of tourism between tourists and the service personnel? (temporary meetings in travel groups, holiday relationships, sex-tourism, respectively the sexualization in Ballermann-tourism, but also seasonal partnerships between service personnel of the same or of different social hierarchy)
-How do migrants from the global South working as service personnel in the EU/Switzerland (e.g. at a skiing hut) perceive the phenomena of mass-tourism?
-Does tourism serve the cultural exchange and/or the intercultural socialization?
-How does the daily routine of someone who makes a living by tourism look like? What are their dreams for life?
-How do the forms of accommodation for the employees that are better off and work in the management differ from the ones for the service personnel of different social ranks in such tourist destinations?
-Who are the pioneers and promoters of the development of tourism? (e.g. the former private Austrian South-Rail Company around the beginning of the century made whole destinations from Semmering, in the Lower Alps, to Opatja, at the Croatian Adriatic Sea, not only accessible by rail but also helped it to develop in respect to urban architecture!)
-Which role do local Mafiosi, traditional men’s rope teams, or local heroes and their real estate imperials play in respect to the modernization of tourist places? (e.g. how did they gain their imperials? How exactly did their insider knowledge in respect to developmental planning and public support systems influence the building formations? How and when does the real estate speculation in the tourist regions boom? How do local patriarchs react to super-regional tourist companies that invade their territory respectively vice versa?
-Since when has the public hand interfered into the development of tourism and has regulated it and which support instruments are used?
3. Architecture and landscape
-Which specific landscapes, architectures and infrastructures are conditioned by tourism, respectively are created. How are they structured and organized and in which relation can they be seen in respect to the regime of point of view and their social effect?
-What are the effects of tourism in the area of housing structure, landscape and city planning?
-Which special infrastructure amenities have come along with winter sports? (e.g. skiing-lifts and cable-cars, roads to the stations, parking lots, avalanche barricades, avalanche blasting installations, helicopter stations for emergency flights, water pipe networks for artificial snow making machines, artificial ponds for the supply of the snow making machines, access-control systems on a computer basis, and so on)
-Which special infrastructure amenities have developed through traditional summer tourism?
-How do we react to the change of climate?
-What does it mean when attractions from summer-and winter destinations are transferred to the urban agglomerations? (event gastronomy, cross city-skiing, cross country skiing-and snowboard events in artificial landscapes in the middle of centers, such as artificial beaches.)
4.Processes of production and economical aspects
-Which economical status has tourism got in total compared to other areas of our economy? How big is the portion of the shadow economy that is accepted or has derived from it?
-How function the specific processes of production of tourism, who are the actors, what are the resources and how are goods produced?
-How are the capital-, material,-and personal affluent organized? (e.g. credits for investments of tourism companies, the booking of the tourists, the transport of the raw materials for food and drinks, the recruiting and the transport of seasonal workers and of tourists. They will meet after a journey of a few hundred kilometers at a supposedely idyllic skiing hut)
-In what ways can technologies and tools that were developed in tourism also reach other target markets? (the Salzburg based company Skidata gained their know-how with electronic ticketing systems for skiing resorts and nowadays is one of the market leaders with access control systems. Also their panorama cameras are not only used for the weather check anymore but also for the Schengen boarder control.)
-which influence have got "mega-events” in comparison to "traditional” attractions in respect to the marketing and the creation and the social structure of destinations? (here, with the help of technical infrastructures, also service personnel are imported temporarily, the advertisement is not directed to the population or local visitors anymore, but in the best case to the VIP’s of the main sponsors and especially to the millions of the television audience)