Introduction

Welcome to the first edition of Tourism Horizons: Emerging Voices in Tourism Studies, a Student Research Collection developed at SAIT. This collection brings together a selection of high‑quality undergraduate research produced within advanced tourism courses and invites readers to engage with tourism not only as an economic activity but also as a social, cultural, political, and ethical phenomenon.

The works included in this collection originated as course assignments—case studies, policy analyses, research posters, and news investigations—created as part of students’ regular academic work. Rather than treating these assignments as disposable, this collection was developed to recognize student learning as a legitimate form of knowledge production. Through revision, editorial support, and informed consent, selected works were transformed into scholarly contributions intended to impact a wider audience.

Thus, the works in this collection are intended to inform general readers about tourism and hospitality‑related topics, contemporary issues, and emerging debates grounded in evidence, attentive to context, and oriented toward understanding how tourism operates and why it matters. The pieces may also be of interest to readers working in tourism and hospitality, public policy, destination management, sustainability, community development, and related fields, who will recognize many of the real‑world questions, tensions, and trade‑offs explored across the collection.

Readers will notice a diversity of approaches, formats, and scales of analysis across the collection. Some works are individually authored, while others reflect collaborative inquiry. Together, they illustrate the range of questions that students bring to tourism studies and the seriousness with which they engage with global and local tourism challenges. This collection does not aim to be exhaustive, nor does it claim to represent all possible perspectives within tourism studies. Instead, it offers a snapshot of emerging voices grappling with contemporary tourism issues—voices that are attentive to complexity, and shaped by the applied context of Canadian polytechnic education.

Participation in this research collection was entirely voluntary for students. Students were invited to consider questions of authorship, copyright, and open licensing, and to make intentional decisions about how and whether their work should be available publicly. In this sense, the collection reflects not only the content of student research, but also a process of learning about scholarly communication, ethics, and responsibility.

This student research collection is part of a broader commitment to open education, and authentic assessment. It is also an invitation—to students, educators, and readers—to reconsider where scholarly conversations begin, who is invited into them, and how learning can be made visible beyond the boundaries of a course.

We invite you to read this first edition with curiosity and generosity, and to encounter these works not as finished answers, but as thoughtful contributions to ongoing conversations about tourism, hospitality, place, policy, and people.

Tzintli Chávez Luna, PhD
Instructor, School of Hospitality & Tourism
Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT)

Editor

May 2026