290078 SE Seminar Human Geography/ Regional Geography: Mass tourism in developing countries (focus on Asia) (2017W)

At the latest since the beginning of the 1980s, there has been an enormous and ongoing upsurge in the level of spatial mobility on a global scale. In this respect, a particularly dynamic sector is the upturn in (international) mass tourism, whose influence on social and economic development processes, especially in countries of the so-called "Third World", has been controversially discussed in disciplines concerned with development issues.
While the phenomenon of international mass tourism has been discussed primarily from a "western perspective", the question is, whether such concepts and theories for explaining this phenomenon and its effects are appropriate to meet the growing complexity of mass tourism flows. Above all, the rapid growth of the mass tourism coming from Asian areas of origin has increasingly become relevant and also resulted in new theoretical approaches. Thus the aim of the seminar is to examine "classical, western" tourism concepts for their ability to explain current mass tourism phenomena and to compare them with so-called "third world" concepts. In the second part of the seminar, traditional as well as new forms of mass tourism (eg cultural tourism, ethnotourism, backpacking, "dark tourism" and "Asian" forms of mass tourism) will be critically discussed, mainly drawing on examples from Asia.