ABSTRACT
The phenomenal growth of the travel and tourism industries in the past five decades has dramatically changed global lifestyles. But, as tourism has grown as an industry, so has it matured as a field of enquiry, especially in the last two decades when the totality of tourism research has developed beyond the narrow confines of an applied business field to reach out to new learnings, particularly in post-colonialism, production–consumption and power, practice, and agency. Yet the putative coalitions and alliances which have emerged to foreground these critical and interpretative modes of tourism inquiry still have much to do if they are to truly decentre the tourism academy and secure a paradigmatic shift in tourism scholarship and theory. There remains a crucial challenge to develop conceptualizations of tourisms that encompass multiple worldviews and cultural differences and research praxis that recognizes and reflects the plurality of all positions, practices, and insights. In this chapter, therefore, we confront the scale of the task facing those of us who would promote progressive transformation and academic renewal in tourism enquiry. We begin the chapter by challenging and deconstructing the tourism academy, before moving to critique its production of academic knowledge and its dominant discourses. We end our contribution with a call for more resistance from within the academy to those sites of power, which shore up existing points of privilege and stand in the way of more inclusive scholarship.
