Identity theories in tourism: examples and challenges
Prof. Xiaoyue ZHANG
Associate Professor, Department of Marketing, Business School
University of Nottingham, UK
Date: 15 January 2025 (Wednesday)
Time: 14:30 – 16:00
Venue: E22 – G015
Host: Prof. Lawrence FONG, Associate Professor in Integrated Resort and Tourism Management
Abstract
For the past decade, identity theory has gradually gained popularity in tourism research, but its power in shaping tourism research is still in a preliminary stage. As tourism is one of the defining activities of the modern world, identity theory becomes increasingly valuable in shedding light on ways in which one is related to, and understands, us and others. Surprisingly, social and national identities are often used interchangeably in many tourism studies, resulting in a lack of clarity about the concept. It thus creates difficulties for theory development, making operationalisation of identity theories difficult for future tourism studies. However, this growing trend has also produced considerable fragmentation and theoretical confusion. The “indisciplinary” nature of tourism studies (Tribe, 1997) adds another challenge to developing common understanding of identity in tourism as identity theories are developed from various disciplines including, psychology, sociology, political science and many others. Consequently, identity theories have been utilised in various contexts with extremely diverse and fragmented understandings and approaches. This seminar aims to share preliminary observations on identity theories in tourism and the challenges of conducting identity-related research, supported by examples. While it does not claim to comprehensively cover all identity theories in tourism, it seeks to provide an initial discussion on the topic.
Speaker
Prof. Carol Zhang is an Associate Professor at University of Nottingham, UK. She is also the deputy director of Sustainable Travel and Tourism Advanced Research Centre (STTAR-Centre) at the university. She is a tourism marketing and identity researcher, constantly pursuing high quality research. Her research primarily focused on social-political changes, with interests in examining how those changes impact on social and self-identities in the context of international tourism. She also has extensive experience in working with destination marketing organizations and cultural spaces and in making destinations more accessible to wider audiences. She has applied different research methodological approaches into her research, including critical discourse analysis, semiotic analysis, hermeneutic phenomenology, mixed method and survey design. She has published 32 articles, 12 of which are published in higher-tier journals (ranked as ABS 4).
All are welcome!
