The Critical Turn in Tourism Studies

Creating an Academy of Hope

Irena Ateljevic, Nigel Morgan, Annette Pritchard, Irena Ateljevic, Nigel Morgan, Annette Pritchard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136656385
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

In today's increasingly complex tourism environment, decision-making requires a rounded, well-informed view of the whole. Critical distance should be encouraged, consultation and intellectual rigour should be the norm amongst managers and there needs to be a radical shift in our approach to educating future tourism and hospitality managers and researchers.

This second edition intends to move the debate forward by exploring how critical tourism inquiry can make a difference in the world, linking tourism education driven by the values of empowerment, partnership and ethics to policy and practice. This volume is designed to enable its reader to think through vital concepts and theories relating to tourism and hospitality management, stimulate critical thinking and use multidisciplinary perspectives. The book is organized around three key ways of producing social change in and through tourism: critical thinking, critical education and critical action. Part one focuses on the importance of critical thinking in tourism research and deals with two key topics of our academic endeavours (i) tourism epistemology and theoretical and conceptual developments; (ii) research entanglements, knowledge production and reflexivity. Part two considers 'the university as a site for activism' by mapping out the moral, academic and practical role of educators in developing ethical and responsible graduates and explores the student experience. The final part attempts to provide new understandings of the ways in which social justice and social transformation can be achieved in and through tourism.

This timely and thought provoking book which collectively questions tourism's current and future role in societal development is essential reading for students, researchers and academics interested in Tourism & Hospitality.

Part I

Critical tourism research

Annette Pritchard

Today the tourism research field is characterised by tremendous growth and increasing fragmentation. There has been an explosion in the number of tourism-related programmes offered by higher education institutions, and the number of tourism-related journals has grown from a dozen in the 1970s to around 150 today, over half of them established in the last decade alone. Yet despite this growth much tourism scholarship continues to pursue narrow empirical studies at the expense of theoretical or conceptual writing. After half a century of sustained tourism enquiry our field still neglects its ontological, epistemological and methodological shortcomings. As a consequence, tourism scholarship has remained on the margins of many of the philosophical debates which have energised the wider social sciences during that time. Moreover, tourism is typically found in business and management schools, where critical reflections on the market economy are all too rare and whose leading researchers continually eschew key social, political and ethical questions in favour of technical, problem-solving research. While on the surface tourism enquiry thrives, it faces a yawning philosophical gap.

It is incumbent on tourism researchers to bridge this gap and to push tourism's ontological and methodological boundaries much more rigorously. The four chapters which comprise this part of the book each take on this task in different ways and each evolves the hopeful tourism scholarship project. While this part of the book is focused on the research issues of positionality and critical emotionality (Ali), performance, voice and narrative (Noy), reflexivity (Mair) and the post-disciplinary terrain which stretches before critical tourism scholars (Hollinshead), there is clear overlap with the other parts of the book. This reflects hopeful tourism scholarship's agenda to promote knowledge-based critique in conjunction with education and action for planetary responsibility – the research–education–action nexus. Thus, the following four chapters also discuss how the critical tourism studies academy of hope endeavours to energise self-reflexive and emotionally literate learners and professionals (Ali), confront the blurring of academia and political activism (Noy), scrutinise how engaging in critical and reflexive research can sharpen our consideration of grassroots power relations (Mair) and consider postgraduate activist and intellectually open curricula (Hollinshead).

Nazia Ali opens this suite of chapters with discussion of tourism enquiry's putative engagement with critical emotionality. Building on the theoretical stances of reflexivity as an emotional process, she focuses on her ethnographic engagements with the Pakistani community in her doctoral fieldwork – people she considered as her ‘own’. Her chapter describes how she moved through revolving outsider and insider spaces of the research setting and how she empathised with her informants’ living in-between the hyphens of a British and Pakistani ethnic identity. This account is followed by Chaim Noy's examination of how tourism discourses and practices are used for political objectives in Occupied East Jerusalem and how he shifted into an activist academic position. Noy employs performance, voice and narrative as his conceptual framework to interrogate the powerful colonial discourses of tourism – concepts which are readily critical due to the notion of plurality which they imply. His chapter eloquently demonstrates how, even when there is seemingly one dominant voice, if we listen carefully we can discern other often silenced, subversive and resistive narratives. This chapter is followed by Heather Mair's examination of the practical implications of becoming a critical tourism researcher and her reflections on nearly a decade of research with an activist edge with small Canadian communities. She considers the opportunities and obligations inherent in advocacy scholarship and asks, ‘how can we ensure that tourism development and research comes closer to its emancipatory potential?’ This look to the future is taken up by Keith Hollinshead as he aptly rounds off Part I. In a wide-ranging essay which urges us to embrace hybrid forms of post-disciplinary knowing, he discusses the shifts in the social sciences resulting from the loosening of the grip of universalism and generalisability and reflects on the implications for tourism of the new pluralist reinterpretations of human, cultural, psychic and political life.

1 Researcher reflexivity in tourism
studies research

Dynamical dances with emotions

Nazia Ali

Introduction

This chapter examines the dynamics of emotions in tourism studies research in the context of reflexivity. The focus is upon the experience of various emotions during interpretive ethnographic fieldwork, rather than researching emotions per se. This process is commonly referred to, from a sociological perspective, as the ‘emotionalization of reflexivity’ (Holmes 2010: 139). The ‘emotionalization of reflexivity’ emphasises the importance of emotions in research encounters with informants and consequently the influence of these emotions upon the researcher's life. Therefore, the premise of this chapter is to build on the theoretical stances of reflexivity as an emotional process and contribute to the emerging study, in the field of tourism studies, of critical emotionality in reflexive research agendas. The current work extensively focuses upon my emotional interpretive ethnographic engagements with people and populations I considered as my ‘own’ — the Pakistani community. This concept of ‘own’ was previously critically explored in the 2nd Critical Tourism Studies Conference, Split: Croatia (Ali 2007) to understand the emics and etics of studying people and populations with whom I perceived to share a similar ethnic (Pakistani), religious (Muslim) and racial (Asian) identity (see Ali 2007 and Ali 2010 for reflexivity and identity-making/remaking/demaking in interpretive ethnography). This chapter interprets the emotions that surfaced as a consequence of my interactions with research informants and my emotional reactions to their responses while conducting the fieldwork.

The study of emotions in qualitative research, i.e. interpretive ethnography, challenges positivistic/scientific notions on the production of knowledge, which claim to be objective and rational. Matthews et al. (2004: 3) argue that scientifically objective investigations are at risk of producing ‘emotionally illiterate’ researchers incompetent of identifying, expressing, understanding and assimilating their emotions in their studies. On the contrary, linking emotions with intelligence in knowledge production, or what is commonly referred to as ‘emotional intelligence’ (EI) (Goleman 1995) undermines this scientific distinction between ‘heart’ and ‘head’. Goleman (1995: 43) draws upon the work of Yale psychologist Peter Salovey to explain the concept of emotional intelligence, which is, to mention but a few important tenets, about ‘knowing one‘s emotions’ (self awareness); and ‘recognising emotions in others’ (empathy). The notion of emotional intelligence is further advanced by Mayer and Salovey:

Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth.

(1997: 5)

The notion of emotional intelligence is also reflected in the Critical Tourism Studies Academy of Hope, which encourages its associates or critical thinkers to create ‘critical turns’, which are informed by emotionally intelligent academic endeavours to fuel self-reflexive – emotionally literate – students/professionals, as well as to engage themselves in emotionally intelligent and self-reflexive academic endeavours, all with the aim to, hopefully and courageously, make a difference in the worlds of tourism.

Theoretical and conceptual issues

Defining reflexivity

Reflexivity is more often than not linked with qualitative inquiry whereby the researcher is aware of her/his presence in the construction of knowledge, and in the conduct of research, the fieldworker scrutinises and exposes her/his subjectivities as a result of interactions with the researched (Hertz 1997; May 1998; Nightingale and Cromby 1999; Denzin and Lincoln 2000; Lincoln and Guba 2000; Willig 2001; Holliday 2002). Willig identifies two forms of reflexivity: (1) the personal; and (2) the epistemological:

Personal reflexivity involves reflecting upon the ways in which our own values, experiences, interests, beliefs, political commitments, wider aims in life and social identities have shaped the research. It also involves thinking about how the research may have affected and possibly changed us, as people and as researchers. Epistemological reflexivity requires us to engage with questions such as: […] How could the research question have been investigated differently? […] Thus, epistemological reflexivity encourages us to reflect upon the assumptions (about the world, about knowledge) that we have made in the course of the research, and it helps us to think about the implications of such assumptions for the research and its findings.

(2001: 10, emphasis in original)

Of particular relevance to this work is ‘personal reflexivity’, because my reflexive practice concentrated predominately upon ways in which the research process moulded my ethnic (Pakistani) identity and the altering states of emotions experienced during interpretive ethnography.

Describing emotions

Emotions can be ‘negative’ (e.g. sadness); ‘positive’ (e.g. happiness); ‘passive’ (e.g. empathy); ‘active’ (e.g. alarmed); ‘obstructive’ (e.g. frustration); ‘conducive’ (e.g. impressed); ‘low power’ (e.g. embarrassed); and, ‘high power’ (e.g. triumphant) (Scherer 2005: 720). According to Lupton (1998), emotions emerge through social and cultural interactions and entanglements with people, places and spaces. Thus, it can be argued that the research setting, for qualitative field-workers, is an intensively and interactively emotional domain, both socially and culturally, because such situational experiences impact upon ‘ways of seeing the world’ under study (McLaughlin 2003: 67). Different emotions are stimulated as a result of various occurrences, which are self-consciously defined by individuals. For instance, shame (public or private), guilt (linked to failure), pride (feelings of self-satisfaction) and embarrassment (related to shame) are referred to by Lewis (2000: 629–631) as ‘self-conscious emotions’, which direct the individual to focus upon her/himself rather than the event that produces the particular emotion/emotions. Subjectivity in defining emotions coincides with the existentialist interpretation of human emotions, as Sartre (1957: 28) states; ‘I myself choose the meaning they (emotions) have’. However, there is no agreement as to what actually constitutes an emotion, as comprehensions, definitions and descriptions overlap.

Emotions in qualitative research

Many social scientists who advance the paradigm of the sociology of emotion – developing a theory of emotion in the discipline of sociology (Turner and Stets 2005) – have argued for greater recognition of the position of emotions in qualitative inquiry (Hochschild 1998; Bondi 2005; Holland 2007; Holmes 2010). The magnitude of emotions experienced by researchers are juxtapositions of academic, personal and professional identities and subjectivities, which need to be accounted for in the research process (Holland 2007). Researchers cannot escape the emotional encounters, experiences and expressions in their investigations because as Bondi (2005: 232) states, ‘emotions are integral to research relationships’. During the collection of data the fieldworker twists and turns through a ‘kaleidoscope of emotions’, which can comprise of positive occurrences (e.g. laughter, happiness, love, longing and happy memories) and/or negative happenings (e.g. tears, grief, anger, and fear) (Bourne 1998: 92). Hedican (2006: 18) provides an account of how he was drawn into responding to grief following the premature death of a pre-fieldwork acquaintance and prominent member of the north Canadian Aboriginal village, Elijah Redbird:

Elijah's death affected me in a very profound way, filling me with feelings of intense sadness and remorse, yet my academic training left me largely unprepared to deal with the emotional consequences of such an event.

Reflexivity and emotions

The acknowledgement of emotions in fieldwork has been viewed as central to developing reflexive practice in post-positivistic research (Rosenberg 1990; Bourne 1998; Gray 2008). However, Gray (2008: 936) argues, ‘emotion in the practice of reflexivity tends to be overlooked’ by fieldworkers locating themselves in the research situation. Moreover, Holmes (2010: 139) asserts, the ‘sociology of emotions seems to similarly lack emotionality’ and ‘theories of reflexivity do not adequately attend to emotions’ (2010: 140). Nevertheless ‘emotionalisation of reflexivity’ has not been completely disregarded in qualitative thought, practice and writings, especially in terms of the role played by emotions in the construction of knowledge (Williams and Bendelow 1998; Mauthner and Doucet 2003; Holland 2007). Williams and Bendelow (1998: xv) observe the symbolic link between ‘head’ and ‘heart’, whereby emotions are an ‘ “indispensable faculty” for the acquisition of human knowledge’. Furthermore, our emotional reflexive responses to our respondents, shadowed with our ontological and epistemological assumptions, influence the process of data analysis (Mauthner and Doucet 2003). This interrelationship between reflexivity, emotions and construction of knowledge is illuminated by Holland (2007: 195), who states that ‘emotions are important in the production of knowledge and add power in understanding, analysis and interpretation.’

Tourism studies and emotionality in research

In tourism studies research, emotions have been examined in various contexts and are a central theme in the Critical Tourism Studies conferences (Carlisle-Gaye 2007; Dunkley 2007; Everett 2007). The importance of recognising and writing about emotions is central to producing rich text on researcher experiences in the field. Tucker (2009) offers a postcolonial worldmaking interpretation of the emotion of shame during her field work in Göreme, Central Turkey. Shame for Tucker (2009: 453) produced moments of awkwardness and discomfort as she became aware of her position as ‘both colonizing researcher...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Critical Turn in Tourism Studies
• Routledge advances in tourism
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures, exhibits and tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword: dialectical thinking and critical pedagogy –towards a critical tourism studies
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: creating an academy of hope: an enquiry–learning–action nexus
• Part I Critical tourism research
• Part II Critical tourism education
• Part III Critical action in ‘the tourism world’
• Epilogue: hopeful tourism: an unfolding perspective
• Index