The Routledge Handbook of Popular Culture and Tourism

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview and holistic analysis of the intersection between tourism and popular culture. It examines current debates, questions and controversies of tourism in the wake of popular culture phenomena and explores the relationships between popular culture, globalization, tourism and mobility. In addition, it offers a cross-disciplinary, cutting edge review of the character of popular cultural production and consumption trends, analyzing their consequences for tourism, spatial strategies and destination competitiveness.

The scope of the volume encompasses various expressions of popular culture such as cinema, TV shows, music, literature, sports and heritage. Featuring a mix of theoretical and empirical chapters, the handbook problematizes and conceptualizes the ties and clusters of popular cultural actors, thereby positioning tourism within the wider context of creative economies, cultural planning and multimodal technologies.

Written by an international team of academics with expertise in a range of disciplines, this timely book will be of interest to researchers from a variety of subjects including tourism, events, geography, cultural studies, fandom research, political economy, business, media studies and technology.

Christine Lundberg is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Surrey, Associate Professor (Docent) in Sweden and the co-founder of POPCULTOUR, an international research network on Popular Culture and Tourism. POPCULTOUR is the leading research network on popular culture tourism and events and brings together cross-disciplinary researchers across the world with a shared interest in tourism and events in the wake of popular culture phenomena such as film, TV series, literature, music and fashion.

Vassilios Ziakas is Associate Professor at Plymouth Marjon University with a research interest in sport and leisure policy through the lens of an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to create linkages among the sectors of sport, recreation, leisure, tourism and events. His primary emphasis is on strategic planning for obtaining a range of sustainable community benefits. His research has been published in a range of leading journals and is widely cited. He is author of the book Event Portfolio Planning and Management: A Holistic Approach (Routledge, 2014).