Chapter 3 - Structural Entanglements and the Strategy of Audiencing as a Reflexive Technique

Abstract

Tourism studies has been moving steadily towards a ‘critical turn’ (Ateljevic, Harris, Wilson, & Collins, 2005), demonstrating a post-modern/post-structural effort to deconstruct the cultural politics of tourism research and the dominant processes involved in the so-called ‘making of knowledge’. Questions and debates in tourism studies surrounding ontology, epistemology, methodology and reflexivity have been central within this critical turn, reflecting elements of Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln’s (2000, 2005) Seventh, Eighth and Ninth moments of qualitative research. The Seventh moment heralded a:new age where messy, uncertain, multivoiced texts, cultural criticism, and new experimental works will become more common, as will more reflexive forms of fieldwork, analysis, and intertextual representation. (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000, p. 24)Indeed, the body of work presented in this book, and at conferences such as the Embodying Tourism Research: Advancing Critical Approaches event held in Dubrovnik, 2005 (at which we presented some of the ideas that make up this chapter), demonstrates our immersion in the Seventh moment, as we embrace critical approaches and question the assumptions which underpin tourism research. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (2005) describe the future — that is, 2005 onwards — as the ‘fractured future’, which will consist of the emergence of the Eighth and Ninth moments. The Eighth moment, in particular, will confront the methodological backlash associated with the evidence-based social movement, and will ask:that the social sciences and the humanities become sites for critical conversations about democracy, race, gender, class, nation-states, globalisation, freedom, and community. (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005, p. 3)But how does the critical turn influence us in our everyday and research lives? Broadly speaking, what we call the critical turn can be placed under the larger umbrella of what John Tribe (2005) terms ‘new’ tourism research — a phase marked by a move beyond the traditional strait-jacketed obsession with applied, empirical and industry-driven busi-ness research. In the new/critical tourism phase, academics strive to embrace reflexive and critical forms of academic inquiry, keen to seek the stories behind the data and search for more in-depth and complex understandings surrounding the tourism phenomenon. The critical turn asks that we, as students, academic researchers, teachers and communicators, think about the impacts of our research on those that we study, the communities in which we work and live, and the various audiences with whom we engage. While reflexive practices emphasise the agency of researchers and thefresearched, and the dynamics of their intersubjective relationships, it is the act o interpretation and representation of knowledge, which is the most public testament to reflexive practice. Researchers charged with this act can then be viewed as interlocutors (McLafferty, 1995), making choices about interpretation and forms of representation as a process of discovery of the subject, problem, and of the self (Guba & Lincoln, 2005; Hollinshead, 2004).