Introduction: Critical Thinking in Tourism Studies

Abstract

In our introduction to the special issue we attempt to reflect on the plurality and development of critical argumentation in tourism analysis. First, we adopt a "genealogical" approach to the parallel birth of critical thinking in early 20th century European social sciences and critical–institutional elaboration of the "tourist" and "tourism" as contemporary phenomena. These interlaced histories of social thought are examined as "attitudes" towards the grand project of modernity, and divided into "soft" and contemplative, and "hard" or activist. We argue that these scholarly attitudes-as-projects organized groups of tourism theorists, passionate for the discussion of similar problems. The same groups would subsequently develop variations of criticality into more coherent "paradigms." In more recent decades these protoparadigms came to interrogate the basic tenets of business ethics, as well as the moral core of activities such as tourism and hospitality in more fulsome paradigmatic registers and vocabularies. From there, we proceed to present the organizational rationale of our eclectic collection of contributions to this special issue. Organized under the principles and axioms of Keith Hollinhead's "worldmaking," and the development of critical tourism paradigms, the articles discuss four themes: (a) postcoloniality and tourism, (b) biopolitics and tourism, (c) media representations, social identities, and tourism, and (d) cultural industries and tourism.