Beyond ‘Tourism in Rural Areas’: Towards a Geographical Re‐Conceptualisation of Rural Tourism as Socio‐Spatial Mediation

ABSTRACT

Tourism remains comparatively peripheral within theorisations of rural transformation in rural geography, while rural tourism is often defined in sectoral and locational terms, as tourism activity merely occurring in rural areas. This framing, common in applied and policy‐facing strands of rural tourism research, risks limiting explanatory power by treating tourism as a dependent variable linearly shaped by a pre‐given rurality. Drawing on emerging relational thinking in rural geography, this paper argues for a re‐conceptualisation of rural tourism as socio‐spatial mediation, that is, a patterned set of classificatory, regulatory, and representational practices through which rural places are assembled as destinations and rendered legible, investable, governable, and comparable across different places and contexts. The paper makes two linked contributions. First, it offers a diagnostic intervention by specifying how sectoral and locational logics constrain the analytical and explanatory value of tourism within the rural transformation debates. Second, it offers a translational intervention by showing that rural tourism has far‐reaching implications beyond the sector per se, and that rural change is mediated by destination‐making practices, including land and membership arrangements, administrative and governance routines, and evaluation and representation infrastructures. Using rural China as an analytically generative field, the paper demonstrates the analytical value of this framework by showing how destination‐making organises a multiplicity of social, economic, and political operations and renders them empirically visible, enabling scholars to probe the logics of governance and mobilisation for development in rural China. The paper concludes by outlining an agenda for future research centred on explaining how destinations are made across sites and scales and on strengthening the interface between rural studies and tourism studies.