Tourism Studies - master

Tourism is an increasingly important global phenomenon, involving social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental opportunities and challenges. Tourism must be able to negotiate constantly changing circumstances. Expanding economies enable more people to travel frequently and over longer distances to experience landscapes, townscapes, cultures, and peoples. Globalization and technological developments enable increased mobilities, and thus tourism activities. Tourism developments and growth also challenges sustainability of ecologies in the era of climate change.

This study program seeks to provide students with thorough knowledge about how to balance environmental, economic, and socio-cultural benefits and concerns in tourism. Students will address how to meet tourist markets' demands for nature and heritage experiences, without compromising future generations' access to these. Throughout the program, students will obtain specialized insights regarding policy and practice of sustainability; how the tourists co-produce the products and experiences, how tourism is performed and marketed, and how it shapes - and is shaped by - cultural, social, economic, temporal and spatial power relations. The specialized insights should enable students to analyze tourism in ways that provide nuanced understandings of sustainable tourism in a variety of contexts. By the end of the program, students should be able to employ such scholarly understandings in a Master's thesis project, conducted in line with social-scientific and humanities-oriented theoretical approaches.