Packing as Practice: Creative Knowledges Through Material Interactions

Abstract

Tourists are presented with a range of material and interpersonal interactions that often develop into collaborative and creative modes of knowledge production. There is a current push to acknowledge processes and experiences as forged through material relations, for which tourism processes present a range of examples. This article advocates that the study of tourism needs to take a postdisciplinary approach that merges practice and theory, using the process of packing a bag as the primary example. A rethinking of material relations presents affirmative, global, and nomadic encounters for a multitude of actors and situations. In the rigorous, daily process of packing, objects are transformed into fluid, malleable forms—as a mass of material that is being collaboratively negotiated. In this way, materially driven processes open up collective experiences that offer methods of creative knowledge production. Drawing on interviews and photographic documentation of tourists packing, this article demonstrates the potential for postdisciplinarity research that examines possibilities for collaborative forms of creative knowledge production.