Postdisciplinarity and the Rise of Intellectual Openness: The Necessity for "Plural Knowability" in Tourism Studies

Abstract

In this article—which is based on my keynote presentation at the "Welcoming Encounters: Tourism Research in a Postdisciplinary Era" 2013 conference at the Institute of Ethnology, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland—I maintain that postdisciplinarity is a form of painstaking (in time and effort) inquiry that makes considered use of academic and nonacademic forms of knowing to trace the plural truths that apply in difficult-to-fathom globalizing/decolonizing/postcolonial settings. In this article, I suggest that open-to-the-future postdisciplinary styles of research are critically valuable where a range or multiplicity of interpretive cultural/cosmological outlooks on the world has been poorly understood, and where important longstanding or emergent en groupe perspectives have been ignored or subjugated by governing powers/agencies. In suggesting that those who work in tourism scenarios regularly have to deal with such difficult contestations of value across the globe—where the poesis or the fantasmatics of local/contesting populations are decidedly different—I draw particularly on Gilroy's work on "diaspora" and on Bhabha's thinking on "emergent/hybrid locations of culture" to highlight the sorts of difficult-to-read ambivalent/protean/transgressive identifications that are readily the stuff of postdisciplinary inquiry. The article closes with the recognition that today, postdisciplinary investigators can harness much from the recent liberation in "social justice research practices" that Denzin and Lincoln (and their myriad of diverse critico-interpretive/qualitative researchers) have advocated, notably the advances in "bricoleurship" recently conceptualized by Kincheloe.