2020 BIPOC Diversity in Travel Report: Trends + Insights

Founder Evita Robinson of NOMADNESS Travel Tribe designed the ‘Diversity in Travel Survey’ distributed to 5,299 members of their their BI-POC travel community during summer 2020. RESET collaborated with NOMADNESS in assisting with the data analysis profiling this travel demographic in six areas: COVID-19 Behaviors, Marketing + Representation, Travel Behavior + Desires, Tech, Extended Demographics, and NOMADNESS Engagement. Additionally, Drs. Alana Dillette and Stefanie Benjamin interviewed fifteen select Black travel influencers, including Oneika Raymond and Kellee Edwards, helping 'bring the numbers to life' .

**Tourism RESET performed this work on a non-compensated basis. There was no financial gain on the generation of this report. It was produced as an academic public engagement and outreach project.

black travel alliance & MMGY black traveller survey (2020)

Black U.S. leisure travelers spent $109.4 billion on travel in 2019, according to the results from the first phase of MMGY Travel's The Black Traveler: Insights, Opportunities & Priorities report.

The spend was generated by 458.2 million black U.S. traveler stays last year, which accounts for more than 13 percent of the U.S. leisure travel market. Stays consider each city a travel party visits as well as the number of people in the travel party.

Phase I is currently available for purchase at mmgyglobal.com/the-black-traveler-insights-opportunities-priorities.

The Role of Museums in the Landscape of Minority Representation - Eaves, Carter, potter, forbes-bright, cook (2020)

This National Science Foundation funded research will be among the first to survey the scope and breadth of how African American history and culture are presented at African American History Museums (AAHMs) based on regional histories, ownership types, and management philosophies at museums in four geographic regions across the United States. Research on museums in the field of geography, particularly on AAHMs, is generally lacking. While geographers have studied a wide array of sites of memory, heritage, and tourism, museums remain understudied and under-theorized despite the ways they engage the general public in local, national, and global histories and geographies. By conducting fieldwork at museums in many states and cities, this project makes substantial strides to address this intellectual void. This research draws valuable attention to AAHMs, many of which are quite small and on the margins of the museum industry. Moreover, the researchers will work with each museum’s staff to not only disseminate crucial visitor data but to develop various public engagement projects as appropriate to each site. Analysis of these museums will provide a lens into understanding the extent to which museums serve the public through documenting, preserving, and interpreting Black culture and history and difficult events alongside and in partnership with their communities. This project will seek to understand how the Black experience is represented in and through AAHMs, the role of AAHMs within their communities, cities, and the larger museum landscape, and how museum professionals address controversial current events as part of their missions to support communities at the local, regional, and national scales. The research is part of Tourism RESET, an initiative that seeks greater social responsibility in the representation of African American heritage in tourism.

The Role of Geographic Mobility in the African American Freedom Struggle (Summer 2021)

University of Tennessee was awarded a $191,236 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to host a three-week teacher summer institute in July 2021 on The Role of Geographic Mobility in the African American Freedom Struggle. Co-PIs, Derek Alderman and Joshua Kenna along with RESET members, Drs. Stefanie Benjamin, Ethan Buttone, and Joshua Inwood will be assisting with the institute.

A three-week summer institute for teachers of grades K-12 that will provide opportunities to study geographic mobility as it relates to the African American freedom struggle. The goal of the institute is to contribute to the intellectual growth of participating educators and prepare them to create and disseminate important synergies between the teaching of history and the teaching of geography. The institute offers a model of critical thought, instruction, and pedagogical application that supports ongoing calls for greater numbers of social studies educators to address power and inequity. Participants will attend lectures, field-trips, and lab exercises, learn methodologies and classroom activities from curriculum specialists, and participate in discussions. They will develop standards-based lesson plans that they will take back to their classrooms.

EXPLORING AGRITOURISM TO INCREASE AGRICULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY AND RESILIENCE IN THE MUNICIPALITY OF UTUADO, PUERTO RICO - HOLLADAY, MENDEZ-LAZARO & BRUNDIERS (APRIL 2020-MARCH 2023)

$300,000 National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture through the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program

On May 2017, the Government of Puerto Rico declared bankruptcy and the US government assigned PROMESA (Puerto Rico Financial Oversight and Management Board) the new mechanism in charge of making financial decisions in the island. In September 2017, Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico leaving catastrophic damage and high loss of life. One of the hardest hit areas was Utuado, a municipality in the Central Mountain area of Puerto Rico. It took local authorities about 10 days to begin assisting the people of Utuado and it was 42 days before the first federal presence arrived to provide aid to the communities. Civil society organizations felt catalyzed into actions to advance social change. First among them was the Corporación de Servicios de Salud y Desarrollo Socio-económico del OTOAO (COSSAO), a registered non-profit, and community-based organization that pursued sustainable development in Utuado municipality since 2013.

The experience of the Hurricane strengthened COSSAO’s determination to transform its seven member barrios in Utuado into self-reliant and sustainable communities. COSSAO built alliances with other civic organizations, academia, and private companies. Utilizing their own capital, the communities stabilized infrastructure, cleared debris, and constructed a community primary health center in four months with no external funds. COSSAO and local farmers decided to rehabilitate hurricane-destroyed and abandoned farms. Many farms, each about 15-20 acres, have been abandoned, especially as young people and families with children moved away to look for better conditions. Thus, revitalization of infrastructure and labor growth are priorities. The goal is to improve quality of life, agricultural sustainability and resilience. One approach is through the development of sustainable agriculture that acts as a tourism destination, i.e. agritourism. Agritourism diversifies revenue for producers of agricultural commodities by allowing tourists to visit agricultural operations, enjoy local specialties, and interact with host farmers. By combining sustainable agriculture practices with high-quality, experiential tourism experiences, new enterprises and opportunities for community socioeconomic development will be created.

The purpose of this research is to determine whether and how agritourism can improve quality of life, socioeconomic development, agricultural sustainability and resilience in the municipality of Utuado, Puerto Rico. For beginning farms this could mean laying the groundwork for sustainable agricultural production and operations for agritourism. For established farms this could mean developing value-added products and services. Further, there will be strategies for agritourism development, creation of value-added products and services and most importantly, an emphasis on outreach activities and educational materials to share the insights gained from the research project with other farmers.

This systems research design involves farmers, community members and scholars in the process of co-creation of knowledge (participatory research) and adopts a transformative sustainability research methodology. The whole system approach (social, economic, ecological) will strengthen strategies to transform unsustainable social, ecological, and economic dynamics into resilient systems, able not only to recover from shocks but bounce forward towards sustainable development goals.           

Transformation of Racialized American Southern Heritage Landscapes - Butler, ALderman, bright, carter, hanna, modlin, & potter (2014-2018)

$445,423 Grant. National Science Foundation, Geography and Spatial Sciences.

Plantations are one of the widely recognized and racially charged symbols of the southeastern US play an important role in the region’s tourism industry. The sites have traditionally remained silent about the lives and struggles of the enslaved community. But, recent evidence indicates they are increasingly bringing the struggles front and center. This transformation has been under-analyzed.

This NSF-funded research provides a lens to explore the manner and extent to which Southern plantations are incorporating the history of slavery, the challenges they face in doing justice to the memories and identities of the enslaved, and how visitors and plantation management and staff interpret and shape the narration of those memories. The RESET team conducted intensive fieldwork at plantation sites in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Virginia to interview plantation owner/operators and docents; observe, survey and interview tourists; and do content analysis of guided tours of the plantation landscape. It is the first study to look at multiple stakeholders, as well as plantation sites and management types. Achieving civil rights and racial reconciliation in America requires discussing the central but controversial place that slavery has in the nation's history. This assumption undergirds this project’s creation and the team’s desire to actively engage tourism managers and assist them in developing strategies for fully and critically incorporating slavery into plantation museum sites.

Black Travel: More than just a movement - Benjamin & Dillette

Black travelers have taken things into their own hands, creating companies and organizations ‘for us, by us’ – Black men and women organizing and leading trips and tours around the world. This collective of Black travelers has morphed into what is now known in the industry as ‘The Black Travel Movement’ (BTM). Despite the growing popularity of these groups, academic research in this area remains sparse, with only a few studies published to date (Alderman, 2013; Butler, Carter & Brunn, 2002; Carter, 2008; Dillette et. al., 2018; Duffy, Pickney, Benjamin, & Mowatt, 2018; and Kee & Scott, 2017). Therefore, we thought it important to explore the roots of this BTM through the eyes of its leaders for several reasons: the rise of white nationalism since President Trump took office (Thompson, 2016); violence in Charlottesville, Virginia (Duffy et. al, 2018); protests and fighting over Confederate monuments (Duffy et. al, 2018); and the first NAACP travel advisory for a U.S. state for Missouri (Ballentine, 2017); the Black Travel Movement is as germane as ever.

UNDERSTANDING URBAN SLAVERY - WESTFIELD & POTTER

Kelly Westfield and Dr. Amy Potter are researching on a small number of house museums in the city of Savannah, Georgia.  They are taking steps to create more inclusive histories of their sites, especially as it relates to slavery. This project seeks to not only document these site’s transformations but also to engage with visitor perceptions and understandings of urban slavery. Most of the research on slavery focuses on plantation tourism sites, whereas this research will expand our understanding to include slavery in urban settings.