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The polar areas have long endured as an exotic playground for adventure in the wilderness. Tourism figures have remained low and hence the regions hold a marginal position in the global tourism system. Today, climate change and its significant impact on ecosystems and communities in high latitudes as well as geopolitical change drive attention to the polar regions. Increasing tourist numbers manifest this. While early travel records and diaries are an integral part of the history of exploration, academic research into tourism cannot be found to any greater degree prior to the 1980s This review highlights major traits in polar tourism research to date and identifies potential avenues for future research within the field. It shows that polar tourism research is a well-established orientation for tourism research today. However, great variations are in place, and far-fetched generalizations about the two polar regions are growing increasingly problematic. In this context, geographical perspectives should be utilized in order to understand polar tourism and its repercussions in a wider context of development, on different geographical scales, and even beyond the polar regions.

The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Geographies, 2nd Edition, offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of the recent developments; conceptual, theoretical and empirical debates; and critical issues in this field of study.

Reflecting on and building from its original aim of rethinking geographical approaches to tourism, the volume explores contemporary tourism contexts and concepts, as marked by the present era of polycrises, setting out renewed and reoriented perspectives on tourism geographies into the mid-2020s. Across its diverse range of contributions, the Handbook navigates the complexities of tourism as a shifting construct, situating tourism geographies within the socio-spatial, economic and environmental implications of tourism, leisure and mobilities in the new contexts of global change, ecological transition and digital transformation. The volume aims to provide a nuanced and detailed analysis of established and emerging discourses and debates within tourism geographies, underscoring the field's inherent criticality and ideal positioning for understanding and catalysing complex global and local scenarios in contemporary tourism, leisure and mobilities.

Written by leading scholars in the tourism geographies field, this text is an invaluable resource for students, researchers and scholars working in the areas of tourism, geography and related disciplines, encouraging dialogue across areas of study.

This research note contains an update of the research program “A promised land? Drivers, challenges and opportunities related to the (green) industrialization of Northern Sweden,” (nr. M22-0029) awarded by the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond’s in 2022. The document summarizes work in progress and is updated annually in different versions according to the requirements of the program. 

This interdisciplinary program aims to understand the economic, social, and political challenges and opportunities of the ongoing industrial transformation in northern Sweden. A key element of the program is to identify drivers, obstacles, and preconditions in a historical, present, and forward-looking process-perspective. 

With the Arctic firmly in the spotlight of global public attention due to the current climate crisis and increased access to its natural resources, this timely Research Agenda addresses the key issues facing the Arctic, such as a warming climate and tourism in the North.

Academic interest in Arctic tourism has developed rapidly since the 1990s, hand in hand with increased tourism to the Arctic and the subarctic regions. In the volume at hand, experts addressed some of the topics that have arisen on the academic agenda and elaborated on potential future pathways for research. The concluding chapter introduces some overall developments - such as warming climate, increased political and economic turmoil, complexity of interests and relations among stakeholders, and value-based practices for the Anthropocene - that may affect the future of Arctic tourism, and further align this development with the research agendas presented in the chapters of this book.

Arctic areas have seen a boom in tourism during the last few decades, which has led both to an increasing amount of business opportunities, jobs and economic well-being, but also to increased recognition that the development of tourism in the North comes with unforeseen challenges to indigenous and local communities and non-human nature. Therefore, a variety of perspectives from the social sciences, the humanities as well as from science address tourism in the Arctic from their respective angles, asking new questions and experimenting with new ideas. This has led to the traditional business perspectives to be complemented by alternative theoretical approaches highlighting communities, geographical imaginaries and spatial relations, also featuring the application of recent theoretical reasoning within an Arctic context. The volume at hand brings together creative thinking across "tourism" disciplines in order to set a research agenda for future Arctic tourism that recognizes tourism as one future storyline for the Arctic - a narrative embedded in local human and non-human communities.