Full Description
Academics are often tourists—curious, observant, and ethically entangled in the worlds they move through, blurring the lines between research and leisure, between consumption and contemplation in contemporary cultural studies.
Through reflexive and often autoethnographic accounts, these scholar-tourists expose the tensions between authenticity and performance, ethics and enjoyment, distance and immersion across diverse geographical and cultural contexts. Their narratives resist the polished detachment of traditional academic writing, instead foregrounding uncertainty, humour, and vulnerability as legitimate modes of knowing. The contributions navigate unpredictable encounters where theory, emotion, and experience converge, revealing how academic tourism is itself a form of cultural production—one that consumes and interprets the world while also being shaped by it. From fieldwork contingency and positional reflexivity to tourism as consumption, the chapters examine ethical dilemmas across Africa, Antarctica, Asia, and beyond.
This volume will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in cultural studies, tourism studies, media studies, anthropology, and autoethnographic research methodologies, as well as scholars working in reflexive research practices and the ethics of academic mobility. The collection serves as an essential resource for postgraduate courses exploring research ethics, cultural tourism, and embodied research methodologies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies.
Contents
Part 1: Fieldwork Contingency and Analytic Devices to Challenge Assumptions: Cultural Studies and Positional Reflexivity 1. Telling a Good Story 2. Drawing Flies: Artwork in the Field 3. Travel to a Place Both Sad and Cute 4. Privileged Migration: American Undergraduates, Study Abroad, Academic Tourism 5. In Praise of Religious Reflexivity: Reflections from Fieldwork 6. Stumbling Over Researcher Positionality and Political-Temporal Contingency in South African Second-Home Tourism Research 7. The Tourism Researcher: Ethical Dilemmas During Fieldwork in Africa, Bali and Myanmar Part 2: Tourism as Consumption 8. Consuming Nature: Antarctica, Penguins and Pollution 9. The Baba and the Patrao: Negotiating Localness in the Tourist Village 10. Your Comfortable Shopping 11. The Final Frontier? An Expedition to Antarctica and Implications for the Future 12. Authenticity and the Contradictions of the "Ecotourism Script": Global Marketing and Local Politics in Ghana
