(Staying with) the trouble with tourism and travel theory?

Abstract

It has now been 20 years since Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang’s The trouble with tourism and travel theory? introduced the first volume of Tourist Studies. In the year of 2001, business-oriented approaches to studying tourism were thriving due to the rapid growth of tourism. In their diagnosis of tourism research of the day, Franklin and Crang pointed to the lack of theory and “a tendency for studies to follow a template, repeating and reinforcing a specific approach” (p. 6) as the fundamental trouble with the academic commitment to tourism. The twentieth anniversary issue of Tourist Studies offers an occasion to return to this analysis of tourism research and explore what the “trouble” with knowing and thinking about tourism might be today? Where do we go, where do we look, and whom do we listen to and learn from to know about tourism? And how may we work to improve our sensibilities toward knowing tourism?

Editors-in-Chief Notes, June issue, 2023

“…In “Listening Otherwise: From ‘Silent Tourism’ Soundscapes to Privileged Sonic Ways of Knowing” we try as privileged white settler tourists to engage with the taken-for-granted silences represented in western media in a relational approach to sound and sonic atmospheres rather than distance ourselves from them. We try to “stay with the trouble” (Gibson, 2021; Ren, 2021; following Haraway, 2016) like other ontologically-oriented tourism scholarship, such as: “Theorising Tourism in Crisis: Writing and Relating in Place ” where Gibson (2021) urges a consideration of the “messiness of tourism’s relating in place ” (p. 84); “Advancing Tourism’s Moral Morphology: Relational Metaphors for Just and Sustainable Arctic Tourism” that heeds relational metaphors to disrupt a taken-for-granted “nature” of Arctic tourism that obfuscates Indigenous inhabitants (Grimwood, 2015), and Ren et al’s (2021) “Mess Realities and Collaborative Knowledge Production in Tourism,” which presses upon us how knowledge is accomplished through relations and “always co-created through situated research practices,” never through detachment (p. 145).…”

Memórias Afetivas Da Infância E Seu Impacto Na Formação Do Turista

“…Nos últimos anos o campo da pesquisa em turismo se desenvolveu significativamente, tendo uma visão do turismo para além de seu papel como negócio para outras esferas do social, se apresentando, dessa forma, como um campo de estudo muito mais múltiplo e bagunçado (REN, 2021). Em estudo sobre a construção da noção de turista nas ciências sociais, Pronovost (2018, p. 167) sustenta que "o turismo e os turistas devem ser considerados como objetos históricos e, portanto, mutáveis, marcados por interesses de conhecimento.…”

Tourism worlding: Collective becoming in East Greenland

“…By addressing the state that they are in, tourism actors attempt to stay with the trouble along the lines suggested by Ren (2021), in which "trouble is not an issue to be overcome, but rather a condition that we are in and in which we all become-with tourism" (p. 135). As seen from the journal excerpt, friction is not only problematic but also productive, expanding the stories of East Greenland and inviting us to re-imagine what tourism is "really" about, turning our attention to, as we shall explore in further depth here, how tourism is becoming-with.…”