Researchers as Tourists: Fieldwork, Contingency and Autoethnography

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.

Lauren Dyll is a National Research Foundation-rated scholar and Associate Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa, with research interests in cultural heritage and tourism, participation, identity, and knowledge production. She is the co-chair of the Participatory Communication Research Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research and is the co-editor of the journal Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies.

Keyan G. Tomaselli is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, and a founder and the co-editor of Critical Arts. His applied research on cultural tourism from the perspectives of both subjects and tourists is widely published and impactful of actual ventures across South Africa.