The Reimagination of Tourism Studies: Positive Renewal, Restoration, and Revival Today

Abstract

In this second of three related articles on the adoption of disruptive qualitative cum interpretive research approaches, further coverage is given to the contexts and issues that "soft science" social scientists (and humanists, and posthumanists) face today. While the first artricle (by Hollinshead, Suleman, and Nair here in the previous issue of Tourism, Culture & Communication ) made the case for the potential of disruptive qualitative research and subtle science outlooks in Tourism Studies—to help compensate for the domain's perduring calibrative, managerialist and fast-capitalist perspectives—this follow-up article is a consolidation of the advanced social justice material being covered overall. In this second of the three companion article, the authors provide a further insight on the soft science concepts and constructions that have been aired in the important watershed book on "subtle science methodology" by Brown, Carducci, and Kuby (entitled Disrupting Qualitative Inquiry). In this second of the three companion articles, the need for such research-as-resistance insights within Tourism Studies is expressed per medium of the complex ways in which tourism is imbricated with a sometimes bewildering litany of ongoing cultural, political, economic, environmental, psychic, and other matters, something that regularly renders the ontologies of tourism and travel/Tourism Studies difficult to profile and fathom on account of the fluid acumen (or plural knowability/critical multilogicality) required. At the end of this article, a further seven terms are explicated for the cumulative glossary being developed across the three companion articles. These terms include "methodological freedom" and "guided wandering" (vis-à-vis the discursive cartography of tourism). The third article by Hollinshead, Suleman, and Lo (to appear in the next issue of Tourism, Culture & Communication) will complete the additive glossary by explain terms and concepts that pertain to (1) the revised cognitive practices of tourism, and (2) the rhetorics of futurity of tourism.