Tourism studies and confined understanding: the call for a 'new sense' postdisciplinary

Abstract

Recently, in Current Issues in Tourism, Coles, Hall, and Duval produced a very well-received inspection of the state of Tourism Studies/Tourism Management and acutely stated the case for the much more frequent and rigorous use of postdisciplinary forms of research in the (above) twin fields. This succeeding review article in Tourism Analysis is an update of a like “call-to-postdisciplinarity,” which has been in steady gestation over the last decade, and it is now published here as one that seeks to augment the well-reasoned, panoramic thinking of Coles, Hall, and Duval by clarifying the kinds of “new sense” and “open to the future” dialogic understandings that such a turn towards or engagement with postdisciplinary insight would conceivably entail. While Coles, Hall, and Duval have so capably surveyed the distinctions between (mainly) postdisciplinary styles of inquiry and interdisciplinary ones, this review article now seeks to provide an introductory critique of the kinds of postdisciplinary awarenesses that Tourism Studies/Tourism Management now ubiquitously need. In this examination of the demand for flexible forms of understanding that can more readily interpolate the often difficult-to-distill identifications and the new-register aspirations of populations today—notably those in ambiguous/hybrid postcolonal settings—this critique draws on Gilroy and Bhabha to help map the ambivalent terrain of the world's many new enunciations (i. e., the freshly vivified/revivified projections of culturehood). Thereafter, it beckons the bricoleurship approaches (i. e., the slow/tall-in-reflexivity/high-in-demonstrability interpretative 'soft science' approaches) of Kincheloe to help researchers achieve those sought forms of postdisciplinary criticality. Hopefully, there are nowadays not just a few universities and colleges preparing researchers and practitioners for service in Tourism Studies/Tourism Management (on each continent) who can recognize the need to more than occasionally escape the confines of restrictive/ overinstitutionalized “old sense” interpretations of the world, and support or replace them with other and fresher sorts of postdisciplinary (or extradisciplinary?/adisciplinary?) understandings that are not so restrictively ruled and regulated by the often-acute disciplinary normalizations of yesteryear.