2007 GAZING, GLANCING, GLIMPSING:
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CONTEXT
Visually-oriented research has long been a core strength of tourism which is an essentially experiential, visual project. In framing the local and global into sets of performance, questions, and memories, tourism’s visuality has huge potential in helping us reveal what tourism means in modern society. As researchers we are not just interested in images as objects, but in who makes them, why, and the impacts on society.
Visual representation in the form of photographs, eyewitness material, moving images, destination and product brochures, historic film archives, religious icons, maps, storyboards, postcards can all be treated as data. Images are not merely reflections of place and space, but complex metaphors, allegories and illusions embedded in the social contexts in which they were produced.
Themes
The conference presents a major opportunity to discuss the challenges of using images to analyse and understand tourism and tourists. Themes will include:
* Visual research methodologies as the basis for enquiries into past and present
* Representation as narrative and counter-narrative
* Image, truth and illusion in tourism promotion
* Gendered representation in leisure and tourism
* Colonial, postcolonial, and subaltern studies related to tourism
* Historic particularity and touristic imagery
* Orientalism and the work of Edward Said as it applies to tourism and leisure
* Photography as tourist performance
* The dialectic between data and methods and the unpredictable reaction between them
* Implications of ubiquitous digital image making and the emerging methodological
implications
As researchers, teachers and citizens, we can use visual data to reposition our own actions and investigations into people on the move‚ so as to push the intellectual boundaries enforced by the banal ideas that infect many of tourism’s research questions. Interrogating tourism and using the granularity of its theoretical base via the visual enables much richer and deeper understanding of the world’s largest industry in ways that text-based information (the tyranny of the word?) fails to do.
