Subaltern Perspectives of Geographic Thought on Protected Areas Tourism

Geography, like all established academic disciplines, has been dominated for centuries by research and researchers that come from a Western, settler-colonial perspective. Most of the literature and public knowledge about national parks, protected areas, and tourism as we know it are centered in this normative perspective, and many of us have not yet had the opportunity to consider subaltern perspectives to these topics. Here in this work I utilize an analogy of postmodern and poststructuralist theory through the lens of Black geographies and Indigenous geographies to explore other knowledges and the knowledge creation of protected areas and the tourism industry to these sites. I find that our greater understanding of protected areas at large is enriched by disrupting the dominant settler-colonial narrative and integrating knowledges contributed by Black and Indigenous scholarship.