Underdisciplinarity: Where are the humanities in tourism education?

Abstract

It is increasingly commonplace to hear critiques of the contemporary tourism curriculum as overly vocational and managerialist. Such critiques typically characterize tourism studies as a bisected field – one part business-oriented and one part social science-oriented – and argue that the latter element is underrepresented in educational practice. Rarely considered, however, is the role the humanities could play in preparing tomorrow׳s tourism leaders. This conceptual paper explores the current shape of the tourism higher education curriculum, contextualized amid the rising reality of the “neoliberal university,” and then makes a case for the inclusion of philosophy and the arts in tourism education.