In the Eye of the Beholder? Tourism and the Activist Academic - Tourism and Visual Culture: Theories and Concepts - page 113

demands for development and population
growth and mobility. It is for these reasons that
tourism is on the agenda of activists. The ques-
tion posed here is, should academics be cross-
ing the activism threshold in order to make their
work more relevant and meaningful for people
and places?

clear that respect for visual, qualitative, refl exive
and personal perspectives are valued outside of
the tourism studies (think, for example of the
rise in popularity of visual sociology) and that
certain researchers within the discipline are
open to embracing these as opportunities to
open up new ways of knowing tourism.
I have offered an autoethnographic narra-
tive of my experience of tourism development,
framed as they are, by familiar and not so famil-
iar iconographies of place and space, in order to
reveal the image, my active construction, of
tourism held in my mind's eye that has shaped
my engagement with tourism and inspired me
to be an activist academic. Perhaps gazing on
(or simply seeing) my narrative will allow others
to refl ect on themselves, their values and prac-
tices as citizens, tourists, and for some, tourism
academics and open up questions on new pos-
sibilities in knowing, doing and seeing tourism.

Conclusion

This chapter started with the idea that image
and representation are at the centre of many
fruitful lines of enquiry for tourism. But 'seeing'
does not always bring a recognizable truth.
Tourism has been hampered by a reifi cation of
the scientifi c approaches to research and analy-
sis, which has restricted the types of inquiries
undertaken and the sources of data heeded. It is

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