Rethinking or reinventing tourism? Exposing the ontological and epistemological conflicts in tourism studies literature during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT While tourism was halted by the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars published articles reflecting on tourism and what should or would be tourism during and after the pandemic. Situating this corpus of tourism studies scientific discourses within the larger crisis of social science, the paper exposes through discourse analysis two poles of arguments on (re)thinking tourism or (re)inventing tourism. In the continuity of the debate between pro-growth-industry prone and pro social-community prone vision of tourism that was already happening before the pandemic, the debate on tourism during and after the pandemic is challenging the fundamentals of tourism – (re)think; and finds ways to make tourism recover-(re)invent, while not considering the possibility of no tourism. The analysis identified that while there is opposition between those two poles, there is an overlap at the confrontation of (re)think and (re)invent. This overlap doesn't solve opposition and the risk of fragmentations of the field of tourism studies, but show some possibilities of a symbiotic cohabitation.