The Unsettlement of Tourism Studies: Positive Decolonization, Deep Listening, and Dethinking Today

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the rise of many new and/or corrective approaches across the social sciences that have challenged the received assumptive frameworks through which the world is inspected and interpreted methodologically. Late decades have brought the rise of a new generation of scholars who work through "resistance politics" approaches in pursuit of, for instance, social justice causes or posthumanist convictions. The purpose of this article (and its two companion articles in later issues of Tourism, Culture & Communication) is to capture the possibilities and the tensions in the development and cultivation of such "disruptive" or "promiscuous" research acts, and to conceptually situate them within Tourism Studies—the domain that covers the "worldmaking"/"declarative power" of tourism to interpret and inscribe the peoples, places, pasts, and presents across the globe. In principally mining the neoteric and landmark text Disruptive Qualitative Inquiry (Brown, Carducci, and Kuby), an attempt is made to locate the interruptive craft of such unfolding disruptive thinking of and about tourism as rising numbers of Tourism Studies researchers themselves seek to decolonize their methodologies from the stranglehold of Western Modern Science and reverberate more positively with populations that have been subjugated or suppressed through tourism. In building up to the provision of a 30-term glossary (cumulatively provided across the said three companion articles) delineating the fresh thinking that is involved in such disruptive inquiry, this first article targets approaches that beckon forms of interpretive plural knowability, which demand the fluid acumen to map the less-fixed/fast-changeable populations of our time, and which are thereby decent yet rigorous in their critical multilogicality ; hence, this first article glossary covers terms such as "reversing the binaries," "promiscuous methodologies," and "working the hyphens." In this innovative light, the second companion article glossary identifies conceptualizations such as "guided wandering," "postqualitative research," and "survivance" in order to expand the ontology and epistemology of Tourism Studies, while the glossary in the third article offers conceptualizations such as "uncrossable methodolodies," "helicopter research," and "stuckness," which—in their different ways—speak to the transformative rhetorics of futurity for tourism and the peoples and places of the world.