This Handbook brings together experts from around the world to reflect critically on the relationship between tourism and rural community development. It first orients the reader in the important conceptual and epistemological foundations of the topic, before moving to consider key concepts and the most significant and salient theoretical and methodological developments in the field. Chapters written by a range of well-established, leading and emerging scholars in the field consider crucial issues facing tourism development in rural communities across different geographical settings. The Handbook represents a variety of traditional and emerging forms of scholarly writing, including theoretically driven chapters, empirical case studies and first-person narratives, to offer a detailed study of the topic. With a forward-looking angle, it studies tourism development in rural areas, including working with rural communities, tourism governance and ethical considerations. Chapters also consider new directions in the field, examining food and tourism, degrowth, landscapes, animals, social impacts and women social entrepreneurs. This comprehensive and innovative Handbook offers a wealth of empirical and theoretical knowledge on tourism and rural community development, and as such will be a critical resource for tourism, development studies and human geography scholars and students.

Rural tourism represents a merging of perhaps two of the most influential yet contradictory features of modern life. Not only are the forces of economic, social, cultural, environmental and political change working to redefine rural spaces the world over, but broad global transformations in consumption and transportation patterns are reshaping leisure behaviour and travel. For those concerned with both the nature of change in rural areas and tourism development, the dynamics and impacts of integrating these two dramatic shifts are not well known but yet are becoming increasingly provocative discourses for study. This book links changes at the local, rural community level to broader, more structural considerations of globalization and allows for a deeper, more theoretically sophisticated consideration of the various forces and features of rural tourism development. While Canadian in content, the cases and discussions presented in this book can be considered generally relevant to any rural region, continentally and globally, that has undertaken or is considering rural tourism development.

Leisure and food seem to be a natural fit, but the recent, unprecedented focus on all aspects of food has not been reflected in the field of leisure studies. This book is the first to combine these vital aspects of human interest by exploring the interface between leisure and food in a number of areas. For example, it examines sports nutrition products, which straddle the boundary between junk and food. It also looks into hosting sustainable meals, and what eaters can learn about sustainable food choices and food citizenship. It visits ethnic restaurants and inquires about the authenticity of eatertainment experiences from both the supply and demand side. And it takes up gardening, while investigating questions of food security, social capital, gardening narratives and the role of place. The book concludes with a dynamic reflection that sums up these leisure and food practices and sites, and challenges us to continue these debates.

This book was published as a special issue of Leisure/Loisir.

Table of Contents

1. Critical encounters: introduction to special issue on leisure and food Heather Mair and Jennifer Sumner

2. “Just” desserts: an interpretive analysis of sports nutrition marketing Joylin Namie and Russell Warne

3. Promoting sustainable food and food citizenship through an adult education leisure experience Alan Warner, Edith Callaghan and Cate de Vreede

4. Epitomizing the “other” in ethnic eatertainment experiences Deepak Chhabra, Woojin Lee and Shengnan Zhao

5. Gardening in green space for environmental justice: food security, leisure and social capital Rob Porter and Heather McIlvaine-Newsad

6. Growing in place: the interplay of urban agriculture and place sentiment Rudy Dunlap, Justin Harmon and Gerard Kyle

7. Tending to the soil: autobiographical narrative inquiry of gardening Michael J. Dubnewick, Karen M. Fox and D. Jean Clandinin

8. Cooking up a storm: politics, labour and bodies Elaine Swan

Tourism and Wellness: Travel for the Good of All? enhances academic understandings and analyses of tourism as a social and worldmaking force by situating broad questions of well-being, health, and equity within the scaffolds of critical tourism studies. Contributors touch on power and politics, space and place, reflexivity and relationships, values and affect, and inequality and equity as viewed through critically informed and social justice perspectives. This collection of cutting-edge, critical tourism analyses contextualizes and disrupts how wellness is understood in tourism.

Leisure and food seem to be a natural fit, but the recent, unprecedented focus on all aspects of food has not been reflected in the field of leisure studies. This book is the first to combine these vital aspects of human interest by exploring the interface between leisure and food in a number of areas. For example, it examines sports nutrition products, which straddle the boundary between junk and food. It also looks into hosting sustainable meals, and what eaters can learn about sustainable food choices and food citizenship. It visits ethnic restaurants and inquires about the authenticity of eatertainment experiences from both the supply and demand side. And it takes up gardening, while investigating questions of food security, social capital, gardening narratives and the role of place. The book concludes with a dynamic reflection that sums up these leisure and food practices and sites, and challenges us to continue these debates. This book was published as a special issue of Leisure/Loisir.

How has it come to be that paid work is seen as the primary avenue for attaining sustenance, self-esteem, and human dignity? This book encourages scholars and practitioners to rethink the relationships between leisure, social policy, and human development. Drawing on the expertise of some of the most innovative minds in the field of leisure studies from across Canada, Decentring Work questions how and why we have come to value paid employment as the marker of social success and individual self-worth and, more provocatively, investigates the role that leisure might play in its stead. The contributors probe the dimensions of marginalization and oppression experienced by groups such as women living in poverty, aboriginal youth, new immigrants, and older adults and show how leisure can be a vital element in confronting issues in the social construction of homelessness, incarceration, dementia care, disability, and ethnicity. Using a mix of approaches from in-depth empirical studies to more conceptually driven discussions, the chapters in Decentring Work weave together effectively into a treatise on notions of work, leisure, power, and social change. This collection is essential reading for anyone in the field of leisure studies, recreation, or social work who is interested in the role that leisure can and should play in reshaping human and community development.