Extra-in-between-seminar RC50 (International Tourism)

Wageningen University, The Netherlands, 9-10 June, 2005.

 

Dr Irena Ateljevic

Wageningen University

 

THE CRITICAL TURN IN TOURISM STUDIES: REFLEXIVE TOURISM KNOWLEDGE AND THE STRATEGY OF AUDIENCING

 

Q7: What suggestions would you propose for theoretical advancement in the next future?

 

The so-called ‘crisis of representation’ (Marcus and Fisher, 1986) that emerged during the 1980s within the social science and humanities fields has raised theoretical debates across all disciplines, leading to what has been marked as the ‘cultural turn’ of postmodernity (Chaney, 1994; McDowell, 1994; Foucalt, 1980). As part of this cultural shift in thought, qualitative researchers in particular have been challenged to transgress their disciplinary boundaries and integrate cultural politics into a discussion of power-knowledge, leading Denzin and Lincoln (2003) to suggest that we have now reached the ‘Seventh Moment’ in qualitative research. As a result of such shifts and transgressions, social researchers are increasingly being asked to be more ‘reflexive’ in their approach to research, as academic texts and discourses are revealed as socially constructed representations (Fine et.al, 2003; Rose, 1997; Barnes and Duncan, 1992; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Geertz, 1988). The researcher becomes the bricoleur, who “understands that research is an interactive process shaped by his or her personal history, biography, gender, social class, race, and ethnicity, and those of the people in the setting. The bricoleur knows that science is power, for all research findings have political implications. There is no value-free science” (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003: 9).

In this context, it has been (only) recently that tourism studies have increasingly begun to respond to those broader social science debates, creating the wave of ‘new tourism research’ that marks an ontological, epistemological and methodological shift (Tribe, 2005; Phillimore and Goodson, 2004). Like-minded researchers are crafting coherent space for shared understanding of more reflexive, interpretative and critical modes of research inquiry, as Tribe (2005:5) asserts: ‘[f]or the totality of tourism studies has now developed beyond the narrow boundaries of an applied business field and has the characteristics of a fledging post-modern field of research’, citing Cooper (2002:37) that ‘tourism research is at an important turning point in its development’. This shift labelled as the ‘critical turn in tourism studies’ (Ateljevic, et. al. 2005) represents a notable and coherent move in thought, away from ‘objectivity’ of various (post)positivisms towards a broader, poststructural attempt to deconstruct the cultural politics of research and ‘knowledge-making’ in tourism academe.

The recently published Blackwell Companion to Tourism, edited by Alan Lew, Michael Hall and Alan Williams (2004: 14), provides an illustration of the emerging plurality that “bears testimony not only to the breadth of tourism studies, but also the growth of critically engaged tourism research” – research which extends its theoretical base beyond studies privileging industry/market-led priorities and perspectives. However, as critical studies still remain dispersed across multidisciplinary contributions (dominantly from sociology, anthropology and geography) and disseminated in a variety of tourism and specific disciplinary journals (hence still ‘marginalised’ within tourism studies), there is a need to consolidate and ‘mainstream’ the advances made by critical tourism scholars who engage with innovative research methodologies and theoretical concepts in their work. The forthcoming international critical tourism studies conference ‘Embodying Tourism Research: Advancing Critical Approaches’ that will be held in Dubrovnik in June represents one of the coordinated efforts that aims to elevate the legitimacy of the emerging critical school of tourism studies.

Prompted by this shift, in the field that is dominantly institutionalised within business programmes where tourism researchers regularly struggle to pursue more reflexive endeavours, Q5: how do we bridge the gap between fundamental (academia) and applied scientific knowledge (policy, industry, management) appears to be very critical.

Ateljevic et.al (2005) identified a range of 'entanglements' that influence and constrain our research choices, textual strategies and ability to pursue reflexive knowledge, focusing around four main themes: the ideologies and legitimacies which govern and guide our tourism research outputs; the research accountability environment which decides what is acceptable as tourism research; our positionality as embodied researchers whose lives, experiences and worldviews impact on our studies, and our intersectionality with the ‘researched’ as we carry out our research relationships with the people that we profess to study.  It is important to acknowledge that to enter a reflexive, critical dialogue, we must go through a process of ‘getting entangled’ in these forces and constraints.   While getting entangled is often a messy and frustrating process, at the same time it opens up an empowering and rich dialogue, as we search for new ways to improve and diversify the relevance of our research to varied audiences.

The above entanglements can create tensions for academics wanting to purse more reflexive endeavours, yet who are also subject to continuous pressure from some audiences to produce ‘objective’, practical’ and ‘value free scientific’ outputs of their research.  In response to those various tensions this statement presents the coping strategy of ‘audiencing’, which is about knowing how to translate research findings into various forms to speak with various groups.  Being reflexive and searching out collaborative knowledge production means critically engaging with the different systems that constitute our institutions; the relationships among fellow academics both within and across disciplines and research areas; the relationships between the knowledge produced in journals, conferences and elsewhere and those who read, listen and engage with that knowledge; and certainly the manner in which knowledge is produced and communicated between academics and students. 

So how do we ‘audience’? Well, writing prescriptive guidelines to do this is virtually impossible, as audiencing needs to be personalised.  Each person will have her or his own strategies and feelings about how to engage with different audiences. Consideration of audiencing is key to determine how best to engage our various stakeholders.  To understand, who they are? What are their worldviews and social realities? What are their dominant ideologies and legitimisations? How are they themselves held accountable? What is their positionality in our research?  As researchers, contemplating these questions can assist us in devising ways to audience these groups – to speak with them in their language with content that meets their needs.  Knowing our audience though also enables us to make decision regarding the content and style of the knowledge we package for them, to ideally bring us closer to them. 

Audiencing can be demonstrated with a number of examples and I would like to illustrate it with my interest in a backpacker research.  If talking to a critical academic audience engaged with political issues of gender and ethnicity, I may decide to write more of myself into the text and presentations, using ‘the backpacker travel’ only as a research context in which I can raise philosophical and theoretical issues of embodied knowledge.  If applying for government funding from a provider interested in industry implications the same project will translate into a market type of research which requires investigation of backpacker segments and can produce marketing recommendations. Or, if writing up a study about female backpacker travel, I may choose a more accessible writing strategy which allows my participants to locate themselves and their experiences in the text.

In the end, rather than creating knowledge that speaks 'about' and 'to' our research participants, fellow academics, industry bodies, students and the wider public, we need to move towards producing forms of knowledge that encourage engagement, that speak with others (whilst not essentialising otherness) on equal terms, not as abstracted voices that exist in a void. As Wearing (1996:34) with reference to Foucault neatly asserts that we need to “emphasise the power of ‘scientific’ knowledge to construct ‘truth’ and control subjectivities and the bodies in which people experience life”.  

 

Ateljevic, I., Harris, C. Wilson, E. and Collins, F. Getting ‘Entangled’: Reflexivity and the ‘Critical Turn’ in Tourism Studies. Tourism Recreation Research: Theme – Tourism and Research, Vol 30 (2), 9-21.

Barnes, T. and Duncan, J. (1992) Writing World: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. London: Routledge.

Chaney, D.  (1994) The Cultural Turn. London: Routledge.

Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (eds) (1986) Writing Culture: The Politics and Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cooper, C. (2002) Tourism Research, Social Capital and Commercialisation Agendas.In Arola, E. , Karkkainen.J. and Sitari, M. (eds) Tourism and Well-Being Symposium Proceedings. Finland: University of Jjvaskyla.

Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y. S. (2003) (eds) The Landscape of Qualitative Research. London: Sage.

Fine, M., Weis, L., Weseen, S. and Wong, L. (2003) For whom? Qualitative research, representations, and social responsibilities. In Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y. S. (eds) The Landscape of Qualitative Research. London: Sage.

Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge. Brighton: Harvester Press.

Geertz, C. (1988) Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Lew, A.A., Hall, M. C. and Williams, A. M. (2004) A Companion to Tourism. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Pub.

McDowell, L. (1994) The Transformation of Cultural Geography. In Human Geography: Society, Space and Social Science, (eds) D Gregory , R. L Martin and G Smith, pp. 146-173. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Marcus, G. and Fisher, M. (eds) (1986) Anthropology and Cultural Critique: the Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rose, G. (1997). Situating Knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tatics. Progress in Human Geography, 21(3), 305-320.

Phillimore, J. and Goodson, L. (2004). Qualitative Research in Tourism. London: Routledge.

Tribe, J. (2005) New Tourism Research. Tourism Recreation Research: Theme – Tourism and Research, 30(2): 5-8.

Wearing, B. (1996) Gender: The Pain and Pleasures of Difference. Melbourne: Longman.