I am trying to get back on track with finishing up my dissertation. My goal is to have a completed draft by 1/24, when I return to teaching. It's really hard to get in the groove of writing when I'm working on class preps every day, and that will be my situation until the middle of May.
On Saturday I finished the final edits to chapter 6, bringing the total of completed chapters to 3. There's one other that's done but awaiting revisions; 3 others in progress, and two (including the conclusion) that have yet to be written. Do-able in 16 days? Probably not, but it's important to make a valiant effort. Even the ones that aren't written have lots of notes, so it's not like I'm starting from a blank screen.
Tourism and Regional Development: New Pathways. Maria Giaoutzi and Peter Nijkamp, eds. Oxford UP, 2006.
Focus on intersection of tourism, information technologies, and regional development. Sounds pretty au courant!
Review in PG November 07 by Stephen Hanna says the contributions are very quantitative-driven, and (as he says unfortunately) there is only one chapter on critical tourism studies, which misinterprets, oversimplifies and fails to account for newer extensions of, the tourist gaze approach to analysis. That chapter is by Lila Leontidou. Hanna writes that "several authors using this approach have retheorized the relationships among representation, experience, memory, and commodification to recognize that the resulting tourism places and practices are far from static" (557). Leotidou in Hanna's assessment is not one of them.
Methods chapters are said to be good for researchers and advanced students.
I am thinking about this because I need to be clear about where I am situated in academic tourism geography. "As far away as possible" is probably not a strategically acceptable answer during a defense!