Engaging ethnography in tourist research

CALL FOR PAPERS: Special issue of Tourist Studies
Engaging ethnography in tourist research

For quite some time, anthropologists (and other social scientists who use qualitative methodologies) have struggled to find research strategies to deploy when studying tourists and tourism. Ethnographic methodology which relies on prolonged interaction with research participants can be problematic. How does a researcher sustain such contact with highly mobile tourists? But other problems arise as well. All too often, for example, interpretive analyses of tourism media do not take into account how tourists, locals, and others actually use the materials, or ignore the affective outcomes of tourist discourses. Nor do they acknowledge the complexities of engaging meaningfully with subjects who are both transient and reticent to be distracted from their pursuit of pleasure. Ethnographic methodology demands that the researcher make sense of these realities through painstaking attention to social and cultural context that is always complex and messy. Quick in and out won't suffice, yet nor will standard ethnographic practice. Fresh approaches must be devised. Papers could address questions such as: How does a researcher position themselves as being something other than a tourist? Does multi-sited ethnography offer a useful model here? Do the research strategies and analytical frameworks of visual anthropology offer particular guidance? Does the earnestness of ethnography need modification to fully capture the experience of 'fun' and 'leisure'? Does the experiential moment of touristic encounter provide the richest ethnographic context for research? Selected papers on ethnographic methodology and the study of tourists and tourism will be refereed for publication in a special issue of Tourist Studies. Submissions must address methodological concerns, ideally highlighting innovative and adaptive approaches, but fundamentally grounded in the basic parameters of ethnographic research. We are particularly interested in papers which highlight the tensions and linkages in such research between methodological practice, ethics and theory, and which explore the dialectic between touristic phenomenon and ethnographic praxis.

Please send a 250-word abstract to Julia Harrison (jharrison@trentu.ca) and Susan Frohlick (frohlick@ms.umanitoba.ca) by August 31, 2006. Full papers will be needed by October 15, 2006.