Creative and disruptive methodologies in tourism studies

The Approach

Disruptive and creative methodologies

Disruption and creativity are the two ideas around which we challenge and contribute to dismantling white, ‘western’, neoliberal hegemonic social narratives and ideologies in qualitative tourism methodologies. In tourism studies in general, and tourism geography in particular, the last decade has witnessed an emphasis on qualitative methodological research, both in terms of the topics addressed and the types of methodological tools. In many ways, this legitimisation of qualitative work mirrors developments in other areas, such as human geography, sociology and anthropology. Explorations in this special issue contribute critical understandings of the responsibility of tourism research to be disruptive first before it can engender progress and transformation within and outside of our field. Authors debate in more depth how tourism studies can offer multidimensional, multilogical and multi-emotional, methodological approaches to tourism research. These special issue contributors tackle the ways in which research methodologies can be creative and disruptive to the seemingly prevalent narratives within tourism studies.

To further expand tourism methodologies, authors have engaged in debates about deep reflexivity, subjectivities and dreams; messy emotions in auto-ethnographic accounts of fieldwork; ‘motherhood capital’ accessing Inuit communities; collective memory work in tourism research and pedagogy; ethnodrama and creative non-fiction; linguistic narrative analysis, and serious gaming, amongst others.

Disruptive and adaptive methods in activist research

 Around the world, the 21st Century has seen growth in the number and scale of protest events, mobilising substantial numbers of people to gather in acts of dissent. Central to understanding participation in such large-scale activist mobilities is an examination of those imaginaries of dissent, space and place associated with them. However, attempts to examine such imaginaries are hampered by traditional social science approaches that depoliticise participation and are often treated with suspicion by the protesters and those tasked with mitigating the impact of their activism. The disrUPt project confronted those issues by exploring disruptive and adaptive methods that could bring those imaginaries to the fore. The theoretical foundations of the project were rooted in those ideas in contemporary European thought around the philosophy of the event that conceptualise ‘events’ as sites of multiplicity and contestation (Badiou; Deleuze), articulated through the emerging field of critical event studies (Spracklen and Lamond) and the literature of activist tourism (Pezzullo).

Four methodological approaches are explored, these are:

• the creation of a bicycle-based mobile film projector used to make visible spaces hidden by developments in the contemporary city
• the presentation of augmented film screenings, which combine film presentation with non-traditional elements in non-traditional venues
• activist filmmaking with a group of female asylum seekers, and
• a series of conversations that brought together participants more commonly in opposition during events of dissent

The paper concludes that whilst the methods deployed were successful in facilitating the articulation of imaginaries of dissent, space and place, attached to protest and activist tourism, much more needs to be done to both draw such research approaches together and in the development of a deeper understanding of the use of disruptive and adaptive approaches to participatory data analysis.

Making the case for linguistic narrative analysis

We advocate the adoption of more expansive and creative methodological approaches to the study of tourism. More specifically, we argue that by examining how individuals narrate their experiences and social practices, researchers can gain an insight into the meanings actors attach to their actions. Considered from this perspective, narratives become performative; they prompt actors to take actions that (they feel) actualise the story they are seeking to tell. To illustrate its value, we use linguistic narrative analysis to explore how the owner-managers of small values-based tourism firms narrate the operation of their business.

A data set of first-person accounts made of both narratives in storified form featuring a chronological order with beginning, middle and end, and narratives without a storified form largely recounting opinions, feelings and points of view, are interpreted to offer new perspectives on the behaviours of small firms in tourism. We argue that narrative approaches should complement methods used routinely by tourism scholars to examine this constituency of actors (and others).