The Cardinal Call for Soft Science Nous Today: Interpretive / Qualitative Acumen UNDER Our Encountered Epistemological Maelstrom

This presentation is an extension of a presentation made at the 7th Critical Tourism Studies International Conference in Majorca in June 2017. It stands as one of a cousin pair of presentations which argues for the provision of annual or perhaps biennial short course somewhere in the world where those who are interested in critical issues in International Tourism Studies can gain state-of-the-art schooling in advanced interpretive cum qualitative inquiry. In this 'CARDINAL NOUS' delivery, it is proposed that RC50 of ISA should work closely with The Critical Tourism Studies International Network to find a host institution able to regularly stage an advanced short course of emergent understandings in soft science … or otherwise to find a mix of institutions (in perhaps Europe, North America, Asia, Australasia ???) which could stage such an offering on a rolling basis.

In recent decades, social science research methodologies have changed considerably, perhaps in small but important ways in which received 'orthodox science' / 'conventional scientistic approaches' are tickled or nuanced to bring favoured methods into alignment with the freshened outlooks of so called 'postmoderm', 'postcolonial', or 'postdisciplinary' conceptual climates of today. These changes have principally occurred on account of the demand for researchers around the world to learn how to 'survive' amongst the epistemological uncertainties (and the ontological blindnesses!) of having to encounter not only new-to-them knowledges but fresh / confident / rebellious expressions of being and becoming. Sometimes, the changes of late decades (since the 1980s) have actually constituted tall and / or strident breaks with the old 'proper' and 'designated' laws of neutral / detached / universalised scientific inquiry, and some emergent tenets of social science research have witnessed substantive shifts in practice.