Using Drawings as Tools for Travelers to Express Transformation (EUC Spring Brown Bag Lecture Series)

In this presentation, Joelle Soulard, Assistant Professor of Recreation, Sport and Tourism, investigates how transformative tourism narratives are symbolized by transformed tourists. Transformative tourism focuses on pushing tourists out of their comfort zone, encouraging tolerant worldviews, promoting cross-cultural understanding and social empowerment. A creative qualitative multi-method approach is utilized where transformed tourists draw, answer sentence completions, participate in in-depth interviews, and interpret the symbols associated with their transformative narratives. Practitioners can use those narratives for marketing the unique nature of transformative tourism by using symbols that resonate with prospective transformative tourists and aligns with their desire to travel in a way that positively benefits destination residents.