In this graduate student spotlight, Aaron Stark highlights his History Advanced Teaching Fellowship and undergraduate seminar entitled "On the Move: Problems and Histories of Tourism and Mobilities." The course examines how tourism and human movement reshape places, identities, and global power relations. Here's what he told the department: 

"I received a History Advanced Teaching Fellowship to conduct an undergraduate seminar called On The Move: Problems and Histories of Tourism and Mobilities where we explore the politics of tourism and human movement in a global historical context. The course is based on two seemingly simple questions: through tourism, how do we change a place and how does that place change us? And, how does human mobility produce a new set of economic, social, and political relations? Using approaches from histories of empire, labor, gender, and the environment, in addition to scholarship in anthropology and ethnography, students learn how the multifaceted practices of tourism—a global phenomenon since the 19th century and today one of the world's largest industries—shapes our world by embedding itself and building upon larger historical processes. The result is that tourism is a double-edged sword that encapsulates the world we live in: it brings pleasure and even empowerment for some while reproducing harmful practices of structural discrimination and the policing of movement for others.    

The inspiration for this seminar draws from a portion of my dissertation Naturalizing Empire: National Parks and Environmental Curation in Imperial Japan in which I examine how tourism entrenched certain modes of spatial understanding and experience by presenting the empire as a singular, cohesive, and natural unit in the social imagination."