Producing place: Analysing the role of the film, tourism and heritage industries in the development of film tourism in Scotland

In this dissertation, I have analysed how the Scottish film, tourism and heritage industries relate and contribute to notions of place in the context of film tourism. Film tourism has become a worldwide phenomenon in recent decades, with Scotland being a particularly popular destination. Since the 18th century, Scotland has nurtured a strong foundation in literary and heritage tourism. As noted by Inglis and Holmes (2003), these enduring types of tourism have provided a solid footing for the development of the film tourism sector, which ever since, has firmly established its presence within the broader modern Scottish tourism scene. Although Scotland has many successful and economically thriving instances of film destinations inducing travel, there remains a lack of understanding about the underlying factors that produce this phenomenon; what the involvement of key stakeholders from the film, tourism, and heritage sectors in creating and sustaining these destinations, as well as the nature of relationships among these stakeholders. As tourism, media products and heritage are observably growing closer together in Scotland (Agarwal and Shaw, 2017), a complex network of connections and exchanges has emerged among film, tourism, and heritage stakeholders. In this sense, there are various sectors, industries and stakeholders involved with Scottish film tourism and its production, and who—intentionally or not and in different ways —contribute to the production of film tourist destinations. In my research, I have therefore examined the professional cultural practices within the Scottish film, tourism and heritage industries to uncover how various film tourism stakeholders engage with symbolic and physical aspects of locations in ways that, together, shape (a sense of) place.