Keynote by Dianne Dredge – TiMS midterm webinar
We would like to warmly welcome Dianne Dredge to give the keynote at today's midterm webinar of the research project TiMS, which stands for the role of tourism in multicultural societies. Dianne is professor of tourism policy and the co-founder and director of the Tourism CoLab. She is also a visiting professor at the Department of service management and service studies at Lund University. And she is a member of TiMS' advisory board. We are delighted to have Dianne with us today and are very much looking forward to her keynote on the topic From knowing to feeling inclusion: Rhythms rifts and rights and how we can truly co-create better tourism.
Very excited to be here and to talk a little bit about inclusion. And I know that... I don't know, I think that there's a lot more people in this room that may know a lot more about inclusion than me. But I think maybe my perspective, or the perspective that I offer might be interesting and maybe a little bit thought provoking. Because I've spent time both in a consulting career as well as an academic career, and now at the Tourism CoLab, what i'm really trying to do is to activate a lot of those discussions and really push to the next level in terms of where we're going with tourism in terms of building better, more sustainable, inclusive, responsible tourism. So I'll cover a little bit about
about all of these trends that are going on in in my presentation. So if I can just share my screen. I think that maybe.. How am I going? Have I got that right? It's all good? Excellent! Thank you! So my presentation today I really wanted to talk about not just knowing about inclusion but feeling it. And i think this comes out of the the work that I've been doing in the CoLab, and also some reflection on where I've come from in in academia. I originally titled it From knowing to feeling inclusion. And I really feel that there's some rhythms and some rifts,
and also some rights that we need to think about when we're researching and we're really trying to activate inclusion in tourism. So, what I thought I would do is just ask you a quick question. How's it moving forward? Two quick questions really. How many of us know why inclusion is important? Do you feel like you have a just just a word in the chat. Do you feel like how do you think about inclusion in tourism? Are you knowledgeable? Are you curious? What do you want to know about it? If you just want to put a word in it in the chat that would be useful to try and sort of get a little bit of a foundation thinking about where we are, what we know about it. Excellent! Okay so the second
question I want to ask is actually I mean just questions that you really need to ask yourself as well. How many of us feel inclusion, feel that inclusion? When we're researching tourism. When we're talking to communities. How many of us actually feel what that inclusion is? Equal opportunity. It's complicated. It's not so easy. Yes, absolutely.
Emma sometimes. Sometimes you feel inclusion. I wanted to take us on a little journey today. To try and unlock how we might feel inclusion. Because I think in academia and in the research that we do we often look at the term inclusion and we define it, and we try to measure it, and we try to understand it. But we're really quite distant from it. and so i want to take you on this little journey to see if you can feel inclusion so the exercise is what i'd like you to do is just think about this and reflect a contemplative moment so we're all here together and we've come together to learn about inclusion to reflect about it to understand how we might be able to activate inclusion in tourism no matter where we are in the world we've either got this long-term interest or long-standing sort of research area about inclusion and we're somewhat of an expert or we're interested in just tapping into the knowledge we're curious or we need to know more information so i want you to spend a little bit of time thinking about when you've felt a moment of really feeling included so i'd like you to actually close your eyes for a moment i'm just going to do a bit of mindfulness here and visualize this close your eyes and take a couple of deep breaths we're going to open up and hold this space for a collective discussion about inclusion and we want to be inclusive the way that we undertake this discussion so i want you to place your feet flat on the floor and no matter where you are in this world we're all over the world so imagine that there's a thread that connects my feet and it runs through the earth and it connects with your feet and everyone else in this room we've got 21 odd people here so imagine that we're all connected through this thread that's stretching through the earth and it's connecting our feet it's it's connecting us and it's we want to share information now think of a time that you felt really included in something focus on something specific think of a time where you felt really included and warm and accepted your knowledge has been gratefully received uh you've learned something you've felt this peak experience where you've actually transcended your own personal concerns and what's going on in your life to really feel included you may have bought a really strong or you might have felt a really strong sense of joy or peace sense of awareness or a light bulb moment about what others are doing and feeling so if this memory doesn't come if it's not a visual straight away just wait a while take a look around into the corners of your memory where were you what was the setting or the place and what role did that play spend a little bit of time there and remember how it felt who or what were you connected to what made you feel belong like that you belonged okay so you've had this moment to really reflect on what it feels to be included now i want you to open your eyes when you're ready and if you can type into the chat function a word that really describes that feeling of really feeling included so curiosity and acute sense of needing to know so i think that's the last question um honesty family harmony you felt understanding and appreciation connection acceptance happiness empowerment connected to friends and family social reciprocity that's really awesome i really wanted to take you on that little journey the value of being someone someone that's really present and holding that space i'm getting yeah thank you honesty care wonderful so i wanted to take you on that little journey so that you could remember what it feels like to be included because sometimes when we talk about inclusion we forget how it feels and we really put it out there and we we distance ourselves from that the emotional part of that and when we feel included it's all about these concepts that we actually talk about in the literature you know we talk about inclusion we talk about identity our own personal identity as well as place identity place branding we talk about belonging to place we talk about that connection and the place itself i'm actually really interested in the fact that there was there was a lot of people who said it was about social relations and friends was there anyone who really noticed that their sense of inclusion also incorporated nature and the natural environment or was that really the place setting the whole the holding space for those feelings of inclusion to take take hold i think we need to really just sit for a moment in really thinking about how these concepts connect with each other so this is a very busy slide and i just thought i would throw it in here just to for for future if if you would like the slides i can send them to you but essentially neuroscience are known now without any fear of that it's it's quack science it's not quack science we have three brains that affect our judgment and our decision making three brains that work together to make us uh respond to situations to to that help us either feel included or not included that help us uh choose whether we fight or take flight for example we know that these three brains are around the head the heart and the gut and each of these so i've got to move things out of the way each of these has sensory neurons motor neurons ganglia and neurotransmitters and each of these functions each each of these brains are therefore able to hold information to process it to store it and to access it when required and these three brains actually work in in balance with each other now neuroscience has actually found that there's two dominant brain types the analytical rational brain and the intuitive experiential brain so the analytical brain obviously is around people who really let their head do the talking very rational analytical intuitive experiential really it's about the heart and in both those types of dominant brain functions the gut actually is the secondary function and the gut is actually really what neuroscientists have now started to think about in terms of where our core identity comes from it's deep it's visceral uh and it's it's really inside and it will either mix with you know our head or our heart depending on whether we're um we're head dominant or heart dominant now really interesting in all of this and you probably already know this just by intuition because um we're not very good at determining what what our own dominant brain function is but neuroscientists have found that about two-thirds of women will be uh intuitive experiential and about 43 of men will be intuitive experiential so a little bit more of a dominance of women who really work in the intuitive experiential domain so what i'm saying here is that it's not surprising that there's so many more women who are interested in inclusion and and and how we activate it so i've got a keyboard so where and why is this relevant to tourism it's because i've been working in the academic space where i've really been you know over the years i was really distant and i was trying to identify and work with these concepts that i identified earlier but it's only when i really started to sit in the space of engaging with local communities and getting back to my roots in in consulting and trying to build better tourism that i realized that i not only needed to use that head function but i really needed to tap into the heart and to the inclusion and what i found was that there's this real distinction uh in the skills that we we actually or are different in the kinds of skills that we need to actually undertake these conversations in the field and i think really being aware and being able to shift from one to the other and to recognize how we're thinking and feeling about inclusion when we're having these conversations is incredibly important but where does that where does that take us within the tourism uh the tourism area so it's actually really interesting that over the pandemic we've really noticed and there's a lot of global research that's starting to emerge about the types of shifts that are happening in the consumer space in consumer decision making and the shifts that are taking place so i've recently presented another piece of research in which we identified these six areas where there's this global shift happening in terms of a real focus on values and what's essential when we're making our decisions and purchases there's a flight to digital everybody's learnt to use digital even grandma these days and so the flight to digital means that we're more ready to use digital uh products our digital experiences and we're a little bit more ready to go into this space than we have been in the past regardless of whether we're visitors or locals or we are operators ourselves it's also about the shock to loyalty so big brands are actually receiving this shock but people are realizing that good quality local produce and products and services will be just as good as some of the big um global brands and so there's a shock to to the big brands we're really much more interested about health and caring and we're trying to think about visitor experiences and spending our many money to make ourselves or our family uh healthy so we're caring more about the the purchase decisions we're making omni channels used to be just the domain of big businesses you know those shopping carts where you can't quite leave because you keep getting asked if you want to add this or you want to add that that's an omni channel and omni channels used to be the domain of really big business but it turns out that smaller businesses are now starting to use omni channels to say would you like to you know support a local social purpose before you leave our um our checkout would you like to add a donation towards climate or something like that so omni channels are really being used to and to deliver social good as well and obviously the homebody economy where at the very moment um there's been this huge increase apparently worldwide in in purchasing sofas and beds and cooking um utensils and so forth but at the end of the day that will last for a little while and what's happening over time is that home body economy will now start to extend to a home domestic tourism localhood type of of expenditure in tourism so these are all the kinds of global shifts that are taking place and that's actually giving rise in tourism to trends towards discovering our home transformational travel my favorite and and what i'm really uh really trying to sort of come to terms with is the notion of regenerative tourism uh we're talking more about inclusion and care so those consumer shifts are really translating into uh into tourism how we travel the kinds of decisions we make but also the offer that we make as well so i really believe that you know we are moving beyond the sdgs we are really i mean the sdgs are great they've enabled us to really focus uh but we are moving beyond them and there's a couple of reasons why uh we need to actually move beyond them the first is that uh one of the big criticisms of the sdgs is that uh humans have developed them it's come from a scientific mindset you know that brain mindset not the feeling mindset and humans are center of that and the idea now is that we actually need to to be in balance with nature which means nature needs to be included not just a social dimension but a an environmental dimension we need to think about inclusion in terms of those two dimensions now so we're also sort of seeing this ethic of care and a respect for all starting to emerge as i've said the nature is the stakeholder we're really starting to think about system change and how we can bring these values into the system and that means cultural change as well so the kind of model that i start to use and i start to talk about when i'm doing workshops with my local communities is that we have these sdgs and they do provide us with the guiding pathway but then around that and what the sdgs have not actually really covered is the need for us to adopt an ethic of care for all others for our community for the people that that we care for as well as the people that we don't know obviously but an ethic of care for the environment it's about connection and when i say connection it's actually about really understanding the networks the nodes and the relationships and building organizational structures for tourism that enhance the way that we work and transcendence and that's what i really wanted to bring out to you before is that real feeling that that that the the feeling of really transcending uh and being happy and joyful and experiencing uh tourism in a transformational sense with the people you're traveling with with nature and with the community and i think those are the things that in tourism we have not been talking about until now and really interestingly this actually kind of um accords with what's happening in uh the tourism space so the four areas the four kind of big dialogues that i'm seeing are around regenerative tourism and why we need regenerative tourism why we need more purpose-led tourism and travel transformational travel that transformational travel where we're transcending our own personal needs and connecting with our fellow travelers with the community and with nature and it's also about inclusive tourism so those four kind of dimensions have been floating around and i've not really known how to link those to the sdgs but ultimately i think you know that's the the diagram that we need to step back from the sdgs and incorporate a more ethical approach i suppose so the way i do this is i run design thinking workshops and design thinking has really taken off in the last um i would say probably 10 years but it's been very sporadic and also very patchy in terms of its use design thinking can i just i i'm not sure how many people actually are aware and use design thinking in their everyday um life and in their everyday research uh it would be good to open that up as a discussion point at some point you know when i'm um when i've concluded but design thinking actually is this opportunity for us to actually sit with communities and actually experience uh how they're feeling building empathy with those stakeholders and allowing all of those voices to speak and to to have input and feel a belonging in the process of developing tourism so i've moved away from going into when i'm supposed to be doing stakeholder audits or doing a community engagement exercise i've moved away from going in and the tick box exercise of just doing a process but really sitting in communities and going through that process of trying to find the connection connecting inside and waiting for those connections and experiencing that community and that connection of place and that sense of belonging sometimes it comes easily and sometimes you really have to sit and have many conversations i've gone into destinations where i've had to do where i've indicated that i would do 30 interviews and i've ended up doing 105 interviews because people just keep saying please interview me i want to be a part of this and so there is a need for people to feel connected to the process and sitting slowly and silently in the space and and waiting for that sense of community to emerge that's the feeling of community engagement that i think when we treat it as a process and we treat it as part of a scientific rational exercise we miss that opportunity to feel inclusion so what i do here and i can actually send this to you as a pdf but this is one of the design thinking templates i use where i've interpreted what it is to to be inclusive regenerative holistic uh and uh and i've i do an ideation or a brainstorming session around this kind of template where we talk about what does holistic if we're going to uh develop tourism in a way that is holistic that it is inclusive in terms of it brings nature in as well as community what does that mean to you and how might you achieve that and then we have a discussion about mutual respect what that means who might be silent who we need to involve uh and to really think about the silences and i go around that whole canvas by the end of it we've got quite a lot of sticky notes on the on the canvas and then we start to organize them into themes the themes get put in the middle and i've used the uh the honeycomb because it's so connected as a way of putting all of those key themes together and it's those themes that we carry forward into the next stage of the process and that's how i really tried to get inclusive conversations going and these templates are usually available online we work online have been doing that for a year now but working online it it allows people to go back to the canvas and to think and reflect and to add more comments and i usually leave them open for a couple of weeks and that's been a really great space because it actually gets people who think differently who use their head and their heart differently they think at different speeds it gets them really into the process and and more deeply involved by allowing that process to um to to slow down i suppose so i guess change is coming and that's it in some places it's already here but i think destinations and businesses and communities are really struggling with how tourism is going to change post pandemic and what i wanted to bring out to you today is really just these four key points that i think have changed the way that i work with the communities that i work with first is that i i really feel that i've spent far too long analyzing and knowing inclusion and forgetting how to feel it in the communities that i work with so tapping into those other um the the other brains the gut and uh and the heart the second point is about we need more attention to sticky tourism and this is something that i probably didn't speak enough about but we have slowed down we've gone from this really fast slippery mobile global tourism environment that was very very slippery to a much stickier kind of tourism where people are sheltering in place uh sometimes they're even stranded in place and what kind of welcome were we giving these people it's about really trying to understand the stickiness of tourism and we've given far too much attention in the past to mobilities uh mobilities because it was just so ubiquitous but now it's time to really start thinking about the stickiness of tourism and what that means for local localized economies visitor economies thirdly it's about uh inclusive conversations and how we actually have those inclusive conversations and i've shown you how i do it in terms of really trying to trigger people's heads and hearts and hands in the way that they they engage with that community engagement process and finally i i can't really leave any kind of presentation without without triggering this curiosity around regenerative tourism how does regenerative tourism inclusive tourism all of this discussion about transformational tourism how do these fit together so i've been doing that little bit of thinking and i've provided you with that model but i think this is actually a path both as a in a theoretical research sense are we more are we just generating more and more terms which are confusing where we need to go with tourism or can we actually build this into something that's a little bit more cohesive so i think that's actually a research journey and you know that we we need to to think about because i think that um they're at the moment they are independent conversations but they need to be brought together so that we can actually leverage the the thinking power so with that i'm done my presentation i actually wanted to make it relatively short and give you a few triggers in terms of trying to activate some thinking about how you might do things differently but i'd like to hand it over to you to see if there's any questions
2021-03-10 12:45
