[URBANTH-L]Call for papers

[David W. Haines]

Please reply to:

Julia Harrison <mailto:jharrison at trentu.ca>jharrison at trentu.ca or
Susan Frohlick <mailto:frohlick at ms.umanitoba.ca>frohlick at ms.umanitoba.ca


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 at trentu.ca) and Susan Frohlick (frohlick at ms.umanitoba.ca) 
by August 31, 2006. Full papers will be needed by October 15, 2006.