Solomon Benjamin
Biographic Data
| ID | 72355 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Solomon Benjamin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Solomon |
| FAMILY NAME | Benjamin |
| SIGNATURE | BENJAMIN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tennessee at Knoxville |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4653-6754 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 342 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Shit Has to Change, Right? A Call for “Good Trouble” in Tourism
Burnt out, frustrated, and fed up with the glorification of publishing in the tourism academy, the authors in this critical viewpoint touch on counter-ideologies rarely acknowledged within the academy. We discuss the toxicity of publication glorification, systemic racism of the scientific community, the eugenic roots of statistical analysis, and how they may lead to our tourism academy’s downfall and eventual demise. Drawing inspiration from Sald…
Black travel is not a monolith
Sparked by the viral video showing the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter Movement had taken to the streets before but never to this magnitude, nor intensity. Additionally numerous corporations, institutions, and businesses showed solidarity with the movement. These discussions permeated throughout travel and tourism both in the industry and in academia. As a response to the numerous calls for action, and to keep an authentic conversa…
Traveling to escape, resist, and belong: Centering Black Experiences Within Tourism Scholarship
Examining the contemporary movement of Black Travel, the special issue explores the intersection of racial inequities, Black belonging, and tourism, drawing inspiration from articles published in the special issue “Unpacking Black Tourism”. The collection critically analyzes historical and contemporary dimensions of Black travel, challenging traditional white-centric narratives in tourism scholarship. It highlights the emancipatory and community-…
Come on, baby, smile: Moving through women’s anger while travelling
Anger, an emotional response to an external or internal perceived threat, violation, or injustice can be a powerful tool and motivator, especially in the case of women who have historically lived in a society steeped in patriarchal structures. This inequity within patriarchal societies often intersects with deeply ingrained racist, homophobic, ableist, and sexist stereotypes. Although anger has been explored within the broader context of leisure,…
Toward critical race tourism: Valuing counter-narratives and endarkened storywork
In this article, we argue for tourism scholars to amplify the stories and lived experiences of traditionally silenced groups through the adaption of critical race theory (CRT) toward a framework of Critical Race Tourism. Critical Race Tourism includes a specific focus on counter-storytelling, endarkened storywork, and regular engagement of interest convergence. We believe Critical Race Tourism can contribute to racial reconciliation and healing, …
Provincialising Alappad’s Nationalistic Gaze: A Spatial Complexity Siting the ‘South’ Beyond the Metro
We look at Alappad in coastal South India’s Kerala and suggest the spatiality of power as a useful analytic to critique the trend towards nationalistic developmentalism. Recent recognition of the urban beyond metro cities is increasingly framed as a policy-heavy developmentalism. Here, central agencies, think tanks and non-governmental organisations reinforce this form of liberal perspectives, but also, such frames are reinforced by international…
Land, property, and territory: Mutual embeddedness as understood by the tongbian philosophy
The dominant tone of the literature on land's territorial politics misses conceptual complexities by neglecting historical constructions of land practices. An alternative understanding intertwines social and political elements emphasised in the non‐dualistic, beyond dialectics, tongbian philosophy. This views everything as consisting of two mutually embedded, opposite poles—different yet without alienation; set in a ceaseless interaction as proce…
Majority Urban Politics and Lives Worth Living in a Time of Climate Emergencies
Majority lower-income and working-class districts in the Global South have long relied on an intricate interweaving of diverse practices. This has been complemented by strategic engagements with the ambiguities inherent in governing the dispositions of land and municipal services. These processes of majority-inflected urbanization are being substantially constrained both by the restructuring of urban rule and economy and by the exigencies of clim…
The death of tourism scholarship… unless
Urban Popular Economies
What is a life worth living and how is it concretely actualized by an urban majority making often unanticipated, unformatted uses of the urban to engender livelihoods in a dynamic and open-ended process? This is the key question undertaken in this collectively written piece. This means thinking about work, paid and unpaid, in ways that highlight the everyday practices of urban inhabitants as they put together territories in which to operate, whic…
Beyond accessibility: Exploring the representation of people with disabilities in tourism promotional materials
Globally, over one billion people experience some form of disability. The number of people with disabilities (PWDs) continues to rise due to an ageing population, the spread of chronic diseases, and improvements in measuring disabilities. However, tourism promotional materials continue to perpetuate a homogenous gaze catering to non-disabled audiences. Thus, informed by critical disability theory, and an inclusive tourism approach, this study exp…
Land as situated spatio-histories
The framing of ‘southern urbans’ poses urbans as a diversity of ‘landing sites’ constituted around ‘local’ political economies, under capital’s planetary condition. However, tongbian philosophy connects to the complexity of land tenure beyond such implied colonial cartography. Colonial urban history reveals how land tenurial under colonial administrations remained unsettled and politicized sites: in Bombay; urban sites across Canada, such as ‘Tur…
Exploring Tattooed Presentation on YouTube: A Case Study of Kat Von D
Kat von D (KvD), a social media influencer, uses her tattooed body, artwork, make-up brand, and narrative via YouTube to convey her lived experiences as a tattooed cis-gendered woman. KvD’s YouTube platform provides valuable data to explore the phenomenon of using social media for self-presentation and online social networking among the group of heavily tattooed women. Informed by Écriture feminine and presentation of the self as theoretical lens…
Navigating the waves of feminism(s): A duoethnography of two feminist travellers
Accepting reality as multi-faceted, duoethnography questions the dominant scientific paradigm, thereby allowing a sharing of unique, subjective, and evocative stories that contribute to the understanding of the social world. As such, telling our narrative, through a storytelling approach modelled by a duoethnographic methodology, we share our own positioning, visibility, and performance while engaging as solo women travellers. Informed by feminis…
Crafty women: Exploring how southeastern female brewers navigate emotional labour within the craft beer industry
This study explores lived experiences of southeastern American women craft brew professionals with regards to anger and emotional labour within the craft beer industry. Informed by feminist epistemology, semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand the emotional labour of female craft beer professionals resulting in a dynamic and innovative arts-based analysis. Participants discussed their love of the industry and provided insights int…
Black Travel Movement: Systemic racism informing tourism
We can't return to normal: Committing to Tourism Equity in the Post-Pandemic Age
Tourism transformation must bring an actionable focus on equity. A new normal openly recognizes the crises and tensions inhabiting tourism well before the COVID-19 pandemic along with the holistic and integrated nature of a pro-equity agenda. A resilient post-pandemic tourism must be more equitable and just, in terms of how it operates, its effects on people and place, and how we as scholars teach, study and publicly engage the travel industry—pa…
Occupancy Urbanism
“Occupancy urbanism” is a way to understand the dynamic of cities' territorial and spatial conflicts as these shape economic and social relations. Land tenure is of central importance, as well as its institutional embedding. The conceptual premise draws on scholarship from legal pluralism that embeds law in society, contested ideas of property, and locates the urban within an idea of a heterogeneous state. This forms a critique of the excessive r…
Performing a different narrative: Museum Theater and the Memory-Work of Producing and Managing Slavery Heritage at Southern Plantation Museums
In the southeastern United States, operators of plantation museums have traditionally engaged in a selective and romanticised remembrance of the antebellum past that has regrettably silenced and marginalised the historical experiences and struggles of enslaved African people. More recently, some plantation managers have sought to engage in the ‘memory-work’ using artistic practices to reconstruct and interpret slavery heritage for visitors. Our s…
Deep-Down Democracy: Recognizing the substance of popular politics in southern cities
Illegible Claims, Legal Titles, and the Worlding of Bangalore
An ethnographic analysis of the politics of urban land titling in Bangalore, India, highlights an ongoing contest to claim territories, with popular practices confronting elites who are mobilizing new legal and institutional regimes, including “e-Governance”, to globalize that city. We mobilize Bourdieu and Wacquant’s “practice force field approach” to highlight two aspects of this politics viz., (i) the material aspects of land and its rooting i…
Revitaliser la ville indienne: Milieux d’affaires, société civile & politiques anti-pauvres
Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy beyond Policy and Programs
This article proposes a narrative of city contestations beyond policy and programs. It considers why Indian metro elites, large land developers and international donors paradoxically lobby for comprehensive planning when confronting 'vote bank politics' by the poor. Poor groups, claiming public services and safeguarding territorial claims, open up political spaces that appropriate institutions and fuel an economy that builds complex alliances. Su…
Urban land transformation for pro-poor economies
The politics of sustainable cities: The case of Bengare, Mangalore in coastal India
This paper describes a local-national conflict over a power generation scheme in Mangalore (India) in order to highlight two important issues. The first is that the planning of large projects by national and state governments in India often bypasses local government and, as such, avoids accountability to local populations. The second is that the politics of sustainable cities is in the institutional domain; in this instance, the conflict was betw…
Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy beyond Policy and Programs
This article proposes a narrative of city contestations beyond policy and programs. It considers why Indian metro elites, large land developers and international donors paradoxically lobby for comprehensive planning when confronting 'vote bank politics' by the poor. Poor groups, claiming public services and safeguarding territorial claims, open up political spaces that appropriate institutions and fuel an economy that builds complex alliances. Su…
Governance, economic settings and poverty in Bangalore
This paper suggests that an understanding of poverty in cities such as Bangalore (often referred to as India’s Silicon Valley) requires more attention to the governance processes in which different groups compete for public investments and support. It describes the differences between the “local” and the “corporate” economies within Bangalore and their links with government. The local economies provide most of the population (including virtually …
Urban land transformation for pro-poor economies
We can't return to normal: Committing to Tourism Equity in the Post-Pandemic Age
Tourism transformation must bring an actionable focus on equity. A new normal openly recognizes the crises and tensions inhabiting tourism well before the COVID-19 pandemic along with the holistic and integrated nature of a pro-equity agenda. A resilient post-pandemic tourism must be more equitable and just, in terms of how it operates, its effects on people and place, and how we as scholars teach, study and publicly engage the travel industry—pa…
Illegible Claims, Legal Titles, and the Worlding of Bangalore
An ethnographic analysis of the politics of urban land titling in Bangalore, India, highlights an ongoing contest to claim territories, with popular practices confronting elites who are mobilizing new legal and institutional regimes, including “e-Governance”, to globalize that city. We mobilize Bourdieu and Wacquant’s “practice force field approach” to highlight two aspects of this politics viz., (i) the material aspects of land and its rooting i…
Black Travel Movement: Systemic racism informing tourism
Urban Popular Economies
What is a life worth living and how is it concretely actualized by an urban majority making often unanticipated, unformatted uses of the urban to engender livelihoods in a dynamic and open-ended process? This is the key question undertaken in this collectively written piece. This means thinking about work, paid and unpaid, in ways that highlight the everyday practices of urban inhabitants as they put together territories in which to operate, whic…
Black travel is not a monolith
Sparked by the viral video showing the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter Movement had taken to the streets before but never to this magnitude, nor intensity. Additionally numerous corporations, institutions, and businesses showed solidarity with the movement. These discussions permeated throughout travel and tourism both in the industry and in academia. As a response to the numerous calls for action, and to keep an authentic conversa…
Performing a different narrative: Museum Theater and the Memory-Work of Producing and Managing Slavery Heritage at Southern Plantation Museums
In the southeastern United States, operators of plantation museums have traditionally engaged in a selective and romanticised remembrance of the antebellum past that has regrettably silenced and marginalised the historical experiences and struggles of enslaved African people. More recently, some plantation managers have sought to engage in the ‘memory-work’ using artistic practices to reconstruct and interpret slavery heritage for visitors. Our s…
Shit Has to Change, Right? A Call for “Good Trouble” in Tourism
Burnt out, frustrated, and fed up with the glorification of publishing in the tourism academy, the authors in this critical viewpoint touch on counter-ideologies rarely acknowledged within the academy. We discuss the toxicity of publication glorification, systemic racism of the scientific community, the eugenic roots of statistical analysis, and how they may lead to our tourism academy’s downfall and eventual demise. Drawing inspiration from Sald…
Crafty women: Exploring how southeastern female brewers navigate emotional labour within the craft beer industry
This study explores lived experiences of southeastern American women craft brew professionals with regards to anger and emotional labour within the craft beer industry. Informed by feminist epistemology, semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand the emotional labour of female craft beer professionals resulting in a dynamic and innovative arts-based analysis. Participants discussed their love of the industry and provided insights int…
Traveling to escape, resist, and belong: Centering Black Experiences Within Tourism Scholarship
Examining the contemporary movement of Black Travel, the special issue explores the intersection of racial inequities, Black belonging, and tourism, drawing inspiration from articles published in the special issue “Unpacking Black Tourism”. The collection critically analyzes historical and contemporary dimensions of Black travel, challenging traditional white-centric narratives in tourism scholarship. It highlights the emancipatory and community-…
Navigating the waves of feminism(s): A duoethnography of two feminist travellers
Accepting reality as multi-faceted, duoethnography questions the dominant scientific paradigm, thereby allowing a sharing of unique, subjective, and evocative stories that contribute to the understanding of the social world. As such, telling our narrative, through a storytelling approach modelled by a duoethnographic methodology, we share our own positioning, visibility, and performance while engaging as solo women travellers. Informed by feminis…
The politics of sustainable cities: The case of Bengare, Mangalore in coastal India
This paper describes a local-national conflict over a power generation scheme in Mangalore (India) in order to highlight two important issues. The first is that the planning of large projects by national and state governments in India often bypasses local government and, as such, avoids accountability to local populations. The second is that the politics of sustainable cities is in the institutional domain; in this instance, the conflict was betw…
Governance, economic settings and poverty in Bangalore
This paper suggests that an understanding of poverty in cities such as Bangalore (often referred to as India’s Silicon Valley) requires more attention to the governance processes in which different groups compete for public investments and support. It describes the differences between the “local” and the “corporate” economies within Bangalore and their links with government. The local economies provide most of the population (including virtually …
The politics of sustainable cities: The case of Bengare, Mangalore in coastal India
This paper describes a local-national conflict over a power generation scheme in Mangalore (India) in order to highlight two important issues. The first is that the planning of large projects by national and state governments in India often bypasses local government and, as such, avoids accountability to local populations. The second is that the politics of sustainable cities is in the institutional domain; in this instance, the conflict was betw…
Governance, economic settings and poverty in Bangalore
This paper suggests that an understanding of poverty in cities such as Bangalore (often referred to as India’s Silicon Valley) requires more attention to the governance processes in which different groups compete for public investments and support. It describes the differences between the “local” and the “corporate” economies within Bangalore and their links with government. The local economies provide most of the population (including virtually …
Urban land transformation for pro-poor economies
Revitaliser la ville indienne: Milieux d’affaires, société civile & politiques anti-pauvres
Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy beyond Policy and Programs
This article proposes a narrative of city contestations beyond policy and programs. It considers why Indian metro elites, large land developers and international donors paradoxically lobby for comprehensive planning when confronting 'vote bank politics' by the poor. Poor groups, claiming public services and safeguarding territorial claims, open up political spaces that appropriate institutions and fuel an economy that builds complex alliances. Su…
Illegible Claims, Legal Titles, and the Worlding of Bangalore
An ethnographic analysis of the politics of urban land titling in Bangalore, India, highlights an ongoing contest to claim territories, with popular practices confronting elites who are mobilizing new legal and institutional regimes, including “e-Governance”, to globalize that city. We mobilize Bourdieu and Wacquant’s “practice force field approach” to highlight two aspects of this politics viz., (i) the material aspects of land and its rooting i…
Deep-Down Democracy: Recognizing the substance of popular politics in southern cities
Performing a different narrative: Museum Theater and the Memory-Work of Producing and Managing Slavery Heritage at Southern Plantation Museums
In the southeastern United States, operators of plantation museums have traditionally engaged in a selective and romanticised remembrance of the antebellum past that has regrettably silenced and marginalised the historical experiences and struggles of enslaved African people. More recently, some plantation managers have sought to engage in the ‘memory-work’ using artistic practices to reconstruct and interpret slavery heritage for visitors. Our s…
Occupancy Urbanism
“Occupancy urbanism” is a way to understand the dynamic of cities' territorial and spatial conflicts as these shape economic and social relations. Land tenure is of central importance, as well as its institutional embedding. The conceptual premise draws on scholarship from legal pluralism that embeds law in society, contested ideas of property, and locates the urban within an idea of a heterogeneous state. This forms a critique of the excessive r…
We can't return to normal: Committing to Tourism Equity in the Post-Pandemic Age
Tourism transformation must bring an actionable focus on equity. A new normal openly recognizes the crises and tensions inhabiting tourism well before the COVID-19 pandemic along with the holistic and integrated nature of a pro-equity agenda. A resilient post-pandemic tourism must be more equitable and just, in terms of how it operates, its effects on people and place, and how we as scholars teach, study and publicly engage the travel industry—pa…
Beyond accessibility: Exploring the representation of people with disabilities in tourism promotional materials
Globally, over one billion people experience some form of disability. The number of people with disabilities (PWDs) continues to rise due to an ageing population, the spread of chronic diseases, and improvements in measuring disabilities. However, tourism promotional materials continue to perpetuate a homogenous gaze catering to non-disabled audiences. Thus, informed by critical disability theory, and an inclusive tourism approach, this study exp…
Land as situated spatio-histories
The framing of ‘southern urbans’ poses urbans as a diversity of ‘landing sites’ constituted around ‘local’ political economies, under capital’s planetary condition. However, tongbian philosophy connects to the complexity of land tenure beyond such implied colonial cartography. Colonial urban history reveals how land tenurial under colonial administrations remained unsettled and politicized sites: in Bombay; urban sites across Canada, such as ‘Tur…
Exploring Tattooed Presentation on YouTube: A Case Study of Kat Von D
Kat von D (KvD), a social media influencer, uses her tattooed body, artwork, make-up brand, and narrative via YouTube to convey her lived experiences as a tattooed cis-gendered woman. KvD’s YouTube platform provides valuable data to explore the phenomenon of using social media for self-presentation and online social networking among the group of heavily tattooed women. Informed by Écriture feminine and presentation of the self as theoretical lens…
Navigating the waves of feminism(s): A duoethnography of two feminist travellers
Accepting reality as multi-faceted, duoethnography questions the dominant scientific paradigm, thereby allowing a sharing of unique, subjective, and evocative stories that contribute to the understanding of the social world. As such, telling our narrative, through a storytelling approach modelled by a duoethnographic methodology, we share our own positioning, visibility, and performance while engaging as solo women travellers. Informed by feminis…
Crafty women: Exploring how southeastern female brewers navigate emotional labour within the craft beer industry
This study explores lived experiences of southeastern American women craft brew professionals with regards to anger and emotional labour within the craft beer industry. Informed by feminist epistemology, semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand the emotional labour of female craft beer professionals resulting in a dynamic and innovative arts-based analysis. Participants discussed their love of the industry and provided insights int…
Black Travel Movement: Systemic racism informing tourism
Majority Urban Politics and Lives Worth Living in a Time of Climate Emergencies
Majority lower-income and working-class districts in the Global South have long relied on an intricate interweaving of diverse practices. This has been complemented by strategic engagements with the ambiguities inherent in governing the dispositions of land and municipal services. These processes of majority-inflected urbanization are being substantially constrained both by the restructuring of urban rule and economy and by the exigencies of clim…
The death of tourism scholarship… unless
Urban Popular Economies
What is a life worth living and how is it concretely actualized by an urban majority making often unanticipated, unformatted uses of the urban to engender livelihoods in a dynamic and open-ended process? This is the key question undertaken in this collectively written piece. This means thinking about work, paid and unpaid, in ways that highlight the everyday practices of urban inhabitants as they put together territories in which to operate, whic…
Come on, baby, smile: Moving through women’s anger while travelling
Anger, an emotional response to an external or internal perceived threat, violation, or injustice can be a powerful tool and motivator, especially in the case of women who have historically lived in a society steeped in patriarchal structures. This inequity within patriarchal societies often intersects with deeply ingrained racist, homophobic, ableist, and sexist stereotypes. Although anger has been explored within the broader context of leisure,…
Toward critical race tourism: Valuing counter-narratives and endarkened storywork
In this article, we argue for tourism scholars to amplify the stories and lived experiences of traditionally silenced groups through the adaption of critical race theory (CRT) toward a framework of Critical Race Tourism. Critical Race Tourism includes a specific focus on counter-storytelling, endarkened storywork, and regular engagement of interest convergence. We believe Critical Race Tourism can contribute to racial reconciliation and healing, …
Provincialising Alappad’s Nationalistic Gaze: A Spatial Complexity Siting the ‘South’ Beyond the Metro
We look at Alappad in coastal South India’s Kerala and suggest the spatiality of power as a useful analytic to critique the trend towards nationalistic developmentalism. Recent recognition of the urban beyond metro cities is increasingly framed as a policy-heavy developmentalism. Here, central agencies, think tanks and non-governmental organisations reinforce this form of liberal perspectives, but also, such frames are reinforced by international…
Land, property, and territory: Mutual embeddedness as understood by the tongbian philosophy
The dominant tone of the literature on land's territorial politics misses conceptual complexities by neglecting historical constructions of land practices. An alternative understanding intertwines social and political elements emphasised in the non‐dualistic, beyond dialectics, tongbian philosophy. This views everything as consisting of two mutually embedded, opposite poles—different yet without alienation; set in a ceaseless interaction as proce…
Political science (22 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (11 works) · Economics (9 works) · Business (8 works) · Geography (8 works) · Tourism (8 works) · Economic growth (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works)