Regions: Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Gwich'in Settlement Area
Tags: social sciences, tourism
| Principal Investigator: | Lamontagne-Cumiford, Mathieu (1) |
| Licence Number: | 16551 |
| Organization: | Concordia University |
| Licensed Year(s): |
2019
|
| Issued: | May 30, 2019 |
| Project Team: | Mathieu Lamontagne-Cumiford, Vered Amit, Mark Watson |
Objective(s): To understand the practices, motivations, and interests of tourists who have made the journey down the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway.
Project Description: With the CBC reporting that close to five-thousand tourists made the journey to Tuktoyaktuk by the newly completed highway during the first summer after its opening (Last, CBC, Nov 15th, 2018), an exciting moment for tourism is presenting itself for Western Arctic communities. With such enthusiasm from tourists in the first season of accessibility, this project asks: who makes the journey down the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway (ITH) and why? Using the methods of ethnographic research and the framework of an interdisciplinary literature on tourism, this project will attempt to draw forth and answer important questions regarding tourists travelling the ITH. This project will work towards building an understanding of the practices, motivations, and interests of these travellers. This will provide an account which will hopefully prove valuable to both the academic community and the people of Tuktoyaktuk. Carrying out an ethnographic description is contingent on the means by which the researcher gathers experiences as data and how these techniques are tailored to the situation at hand. Experiences become data through the research methods of a project. For this project, several techniques will be combined with the aim of presenting rich, accurate, and recognisable accounts of travellers in Tuktoyaktuk and Inuvik. Classic to anthropology, the practice of observation both silent and participatory as well as short and long form semi-structured interviews will be used. Participants will have the opportunity to contribute to the knowledge of tourism patterns in the region. Participants will have open access to the thesis once it is published in the Spectrum open-access database, as a means of informing themselves on the findings of the project. The thesis written using the data collected will be published once defended on the Concordia University Library's Open Access platform, SPECTRUM. This database makes the research available to any communities and individuals interested in accessing the research. Community members and participants interested in the results of the research will be given instructions on how to access this database, should they inquire with the researcher. The fieldwork for this study will be conducted from May 25, 2019 to August 30, 2019.
