My research so far has been centered around tourism, development and its political economy. For my Master’s (Geography) I looked at the creation of a backpacker enclave as a space of consumption in a rural community in Colombia. Based on this research, I developed my PhD topic. For my PhD I investigated the political economy of backpacker tourism in rural communities in Colombia, examining the tourism production and consumption of tourism in these locations.
In my thesis I explore the integration of rural communities into the global production and consumption cycle through tourism development. I analyse the underlying power relations driving this development, suggesting a new political economy-based framework for the analysis that includes the travellers, the SMEs, the community and the political actors. The thesis pays particularly attention to the development of SMEs catering to independent Latin American and international travellers, as well as the social relations, within the SMEs, community and with the political agents. Furthermore, spending and travel patterns of the travellers are also scrutinised to assess how they contribute to the tourism development.
The study is based on extensive fieldwork in two case study locations in Colombia, using an ethnographic approach such as in-depth interviews (n=53), site mapping and ethnographic observation. The thesis further advances the tourism and international political economy literature by concentrating on the often overlooked SMEs that are also affected by globalisation; furthermore, it is one of the few studies that looks at the production and consumption of tourism at one place in the same study. After completion, the results of the PhD will be shared with the communities I did my fieldwork in, as well as policy makers, to be used in their tourism planning.
In general, my research interests lie within tourism, development studies, tourism SMEs & entrepreneurship, political economy of tourism, post-conflict tourism, music festivals, and ethnographic research methods. I have quite a few research ideas that I would like to pursue at some point, ranging from narratives of post-conflict tourism to gender representation at music festivals.
Juliane Thieme 