ABSTRACT
Uzzell and Ballantyne (1998, p. 152) contend that ‘to deny the emotional side of our understanding and appreciation of the world and our relationships is to deny the very humanity that makes us part of the human race’. Yet within tourism research little recognition has been given to the emotional aspects of tourism experiences. Additionally, the traditional tourism researcher has been encouraged to remain impersonally aloof from her research (Westwood, Morgan, & Pritchard, 2006). The ‘rules of the academic game’ as Hall (2004, p. 143) puts it, deterring tourism researchers away from ‘playful and reflexive’ approaches in favour of seemingly objective methods and writing styles approved by gatekeepers within tourism studies. Furthermore, amongst the social science community of which tourism academics are a subcommunity (Hall, 2004), the author's voice is repressed; this is seen as a method of purporting rigour within qualitative research (Holliday, 2002). Consequently, relatively little tourism research has been conducted taking into account the positionality of the researcher and the author's influence is commonly excluded from text. As a result, studies are generally written in distant third person prose where the author is made to appear invisible. In contrast to this tradition, this chapter focuses on taking a passionate and situated approach to research. My interest in which came about whilst exploring the thanatouristic experience, 1 during which time it became clear to me that taking a cool and distanced approach to the field was not going to be simple or even desirable given that it is such an emotive subject. Rather, I opted against the traditional convention of creating ‘cold, depersonalized, unsigned, voiceless’ (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 149) documents, in a move away from post-positivist methodologies favoured within the social sciences and tourism studies (Wilson, 2004), towards the adoption of a ‘softer’ approach which embraced the emotional aspects of the experience.
