This session introduces the recently published edited volume, The local turn in tourism: empowering communities, co-edited by Dr. Freya Higgins-Desbiolles and Bobbie Chew Bigby. Focused on the importance of ‘localising’ tourism in line with the values, perspectives, cultural lifeways and goals of local communities—inclusive of the non-human living environments in which communities are embedded—this volume argues for a turn away from profit-driven, consumptive tourism models, and towards visions of tourism that are grounded in communities. Drawing on theoretical perspectives, case studies, tourism practitioner cases, empirical research and future visions from around the world—ranging from the Kimberley region to Malta, Costa Rica and Oklahoma—this volume presents a kaleidoscope of approaches and ideas on the ways that a local turn in tourism is and can be possible.

Specific focus in the session will also be devoted to the volume’s chapters that Bobbie has co-written with community members in the Australian Kimberley region and in Oklahoma, USA. The first chapter examines the ways that local governance and tourism intersect and influence one another, with exploration offered from the insights of place-based approaches to governance from Karajarri Traditional Owner, Uncle Joe Edgar. The other chapter explores the ways that history, tourism and the legacy of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre intersect as Bobbie is in conversation Michelle Brown-Burdex of the Greenwood Cultural Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Bobbie Chew Bigby is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Bobbie is based between Broome, Australia and Tulsa, Oklahoma where she is completing a PhD at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Nulungu Research Institute focused on comparative Indigenous tourism, culture and resurgence. Her past research fellowships, including a Fulbright award and Rotary Peace Fellowship, have taken her to Indigenous Australia, Burma, Cambodia, China and India for research and community-based work.