XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

842

Silenced Voices and Lingua Franca in Tourism

RC50 International Tourism (host committee)

Language: English

In many theoretical analyses, the term “voice” has been coined to problematize the nature of inequalities. In tourism studies, voices can relate to the types of inequality dominating in a particular region or a particular subject. For example, labeling a cultural heritage, designing a community-based tourism setting, proposing a tourism planning and development and so on. Silenced voices are voices that have been silenced or that are unable to express themselves. They are more often unobserved in official, academic, or professional discussions. This is often due to the reality of predominant hegemonic power relations. This session invites papers studying multiple sites of discrimination, disadvantage and denial and seeking discussions on how voices might be silenced, which voices are privileged, which voices are suppressed, levels of diversity of voices, and how power is wielded in these contexts? In relation to voice, is the issue of language, and the role of lingua franca in tourism studies, arguing that the tourism academia functions within the limits of power constellations of global tourism. Language is an important factor in this context. Speaking and writing English, also implies the domination of the Anglo-Saxon academic culture (Çakmak & Isaac, 2017). Yet, English functions as a prominent lingua franca for international tourism studies and predominates over more universal, or holistic discussions (Platenkamp, 2015). The challenging question in this session is how does the tourism academy integrate different cultures into this lingua franca in order to include as much as possible the richness of the other cultural perspectives?