It’s that time of year again in Leeuwarden. The rain has stopped (for now), the sky is blue, and while our plates are full with end of the year obligations, our thoughts turn already to the summer and beyond.

At least mine have.

For many of us summer means a return to the familiar spaces and faces of home. The comfort of a (grand)parent’s cooking, reconnecting with our friends, a long afternoon with a book in the sun (a fun book – not an assigned reading).

For others, summer freedom means travel to places unknown, exploring new spaces, seeing new sights, tasting exotic foods, exploring a new you. 

In critical tourism studies, we think of tourism as existing in a liminal space. Liminal spaces are those spaces that exist between the known and the unknown, the past and the future. This concept was developed in the study of rituals – baptisms, passages into adulthood, marriages, etc. You begin in one state of being, say for instance a child, you pass through the ritual and you emerge on the other side *poof* an adult. The space of the ritual is the liminal space, no longer a child, not yet an adult.

Tourism is liminal because we leave our old selves behind, at school, at work, and we experience a space completely beyond our everyday realities. We experiment with different personalities, we wear different clothing, we engage with different people. We perform ourselves in ways that we would never do in our spaces of home. And we return home *poof* different.

How many of you are now also looking beyond summer travels, to your minor term, and all the excitement and challenges that will face you there? What new adventures, tastes, sights, and smells will you encounter? And who will you be when you return to us in the Spring? Many of your minors will also involve travel, travel to exotic or new lands, travel for work - to be sure - but also for leisure, exploration, and adventure.

The questions that I ask as a tourism researcher are what happens in that tourism encounter? How are we changed when we interact with new cultures, new peoples, new questions in our travels? And more critically, in my heart, how are the places and the peoples that we visit changed by us? What impact do we leave on the communities that are a part of our tourism experience?

Depending on where you travel this summer or for your minor, the location will be more or less touristed. I’m sure that I don’t have to tell you that for the most touristed places this has become a significant issue of concern for local residents. Afterall, for you – the tourist – you are only there for a short holiday. For the resident, ‘you’ are always there (Palmer, 1994).

But more than numbers, what concerns me is who we are when we travel, and what expectations we carry with us of the places that we will visit. As my dear friend Kellee Caton wrote, tourism is an activity which “at once speaks of light-hearted pleasure and heavy social consequences” (2012, p. 1907). Much study in critical tourism has been dedicated in recent years to the neo-colonial logics of present day travel, and how colonial ways of knowing and being in the world continue to dominate global mainstream tourism.

Colonialism operated by virtue of a desire to possess the resources extant in other lands, be they material, cultural, or human. In order to justify this expansionism and extractionism, colonialism relied on processes of Othering, something described by Edward Said as Orientalism (1978). The people being colonized were characterised as being impoverished, sexually amoral, and in need of saving. The lands being occupied by the colonisers were portrayed as unspoiled wildernesses, with endless resources and beauty lying unconsumed. The idea of terra nullius was born – this land belongs to no one, therefore it is ours for the taking.

Tourism operates under many of the same logics. The best land, the best food, the best water is reserved for the tourists. This is justified in creating ‘jobs’ for the people who have been dispossessed of their lands, but these are never management or well-paying jobs. The jobs for local people are often lower level with little to no chance of advancement. We travel to places where we feel welcome, where locals speak our language – often because the destination was once a part of a colonial empire. Often people’s native languages were banned in favour of the colonizer’s. Through tourism marketing, local people are characterized as warm and welcoming, the beaches are sunny and deserted, the buffets are endless. No wonder Keith Hollinshead (1998) described tourism as “the industry of difference par excellence” (p. 49).

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to my point. In our travels, as citizens of the world, how do we disrupt these colonial discourses and tropes that have been circulating in our imagery, in our media, in our history books for centuries? How do we break down the distance between ourselves and the “Other” (a terminology that bell hooks (1989) vastly despised and understood to be a subversive additional tool of the coloniser used to silence and marginalise)?

What are we to do, we well meaning travellers who wish only to appreciate, admire, and experience? As a settler coloniser myself, it is not my place to say. It is, and will only ever be, my place to listen. Listen with your whole heart. Try to shake off those assumptions that have been tattooed into our psyches from long before we were born. Engage with the places and the people that you visit with an open heart. Let go of the desire to visit the latest TikTok hotspot or Instagrammable top destination. Be present. Remember that you are a guest. Think of your destination as your living room. Would you like it if a bunch of people turned up, uninvited, and got drunk and started throwing things? Of course not. And I know that none of our lovely CF community would ever do such a thing. But we have all witnessed it. Be the tourist that you would like to welcome to your own hometown, that you would want to show all the special sites and sights that make your hometown the place that you love.

And have a great time. Can’t wait to see who you are when you get back!