Gaze and reflexivity in postcolonial cinema: the pragmatic turn in critical tourism studies

09/20/24 • 18 min

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2311642

Abstract

This article examines the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical integration of postcolonial cinema into critical tourism education. These works help viewers understand the influence of film as a primary source of postcolonial gaze, with the goal of decolonizing tourism studies. Postcolonial cinema reconnects geographic inquiry with the impacts of colonialism and postcolonialism on people and places in specific localities and across regions. Critical pragmatism is presented as synthesizing critical theory’s emphasis on listening, reflecting, and deliberating and traditional pragmatism’s emphasis on practice and place, as well as mixed research methods and multiple realities. Critical reflexivity is explored in critical tourism studies as relocated in pragmatist thought and a basis for abductive methodology and pedagogy. Abductive methodology is identified as a basis for addressing complex tourism issues and researcher positioning, while abductive pedagogy creates transformative learning environments where shared dialogue generates new knowledge. Critical pragmatism, enriched with gaze and reflexivity honed through postcolonial cinema, addresses perceived ontological and ‘realist’ deficiencies in critical tourism studies, while offering an alternative philosophical framework for informing and contrasting popular epistemologies and methodologies.

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2311642

Abstract

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Previous Episode

Collective memory work as an unsettling methodology in tourism

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2019.1619823

Abstract

Research has exposed how colonial power relations operate in and through various domains of tourism. As byproducts of Western academia, tourism research and education are significant sites where the structures, systems, and narratives of Settler colonialism can become further entrenched and legitimized. What research methodologies can challenge the colonial complexion of tourism research and enable tourism students and scholars to confront how their identities and responsibilities are tethered to (Settler) colonization? We argue that collective memory work (CMW), a participatory and participant-focused methodology, can contribute to these disruptive aims by examining individual experience as embedded and imbued with social meaning. Our ultimate objective is to situate, articulate, and reflect on the use of CMW as an unsettling methodology in tourism research and education contexts. Since 2016, we have used CMW to engage Settler Canadian graduate students in a process of critically analyzing individual memories and collective experiences of tourism and Indigenous–Settler relationships. After establishing theoretical and political contexts of Settler colonialism, we present an overview of CMW’s feminist and transformative underpinnings and explain how these are being adapted into the methods of our ongoing research with students. Preliminary insights from this research illuminate CMW as a consciousness-raising pedagogical methodology that, in focusing in on Settler memory narratives, helps make space for decolonization in tourism and tourism research.

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Next Episode

Social mobility goes on holiday: rethinking space and communities through tourism mobilities

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14616688.2023.2299953

Abstract

The evolution of tourism mobilities and their interactions with place have always comprised of ambiguous change dimensions relative to the social, spatial, and socio-spatial mobility of both guest and host communities alike. While different forms of tourism can offer opportunities for empowerment, they can also limit opportunities in ways that are unevenly distributed throughout the social spectrum. The aim of this opening to the special issue is to critically explore the different spheres in which social and spatial mobilities are enacted, reproduced, challenged, and negotiated in the context of the sub-discipline of tourism geographies. It considers multiple perspectives, while focusing on how ‘social mobility goes on holiday’ in three different spheres: (1) consumer societies, (2) regimented mobilities, and (3) empowerment through tourism, making specific reference to gender issues. Against this backdrop, emerging themes are discussed with reference to the entanglement of contemporary crises, and the societal and spatial im/mobilisations of subaltern communities, refugees, lifestyle migrants and local collectives. In this way, the frameworks proposed in this special issue help to analyse current societal and spatial challenges, and offer comprehensive answers through processes of theorisation and empirical interaction.

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