Kindness and Patchy Hope In Tourism Futures: Everyday Practices and Methodologies

Tourism studies has grappled with the profound contradictions we live in, although they are often dealt with through a ‘summing up’ of costs and benefits, or they are seen as problems to be resolved. To stay with these paradoxes and better understand the complexities they entail, in this session we explore how creative and disruptive methodologies can address the ambiguities and ambivalences of tourism futures. We draw inspiration from Tsing and colleagues' notions of patchiness and patchy hope (Tsing et al 2019), where hope is not a universal, scalable solution, but something emergent, situated and uneven. Patchy hopes arise within fractured socio-ecological worlds and through the very contradictions that shape tourism, travel and (im)mobilities. They are often ambivalent, partial and uncertain. This session invites contributions that experiment with methodological approaches for interpreting, noticing and dwelling in the patchiness of tourism worlds. We welcome studies that attend to dissonances, unintended ramifications and feral proliferations of tourism practices. How might various methodologies help us acknowledge uncertainty and remain attentive to what is not yet fully knowable? How can researchers learn from ambivalence and encounter possibilities that would otherwise remain unnoticed? We encourage papers that explore methodological practices of attunement and staying with the trouble, as well as approaches that engage with emergence, indeterminacy and more-than-human relations. By focusing on the patchy hopes that emerge through tourism and travel, this session seeks to foster dialogue on how tourism research can generate new ways of understanding and engaging with turbulent and unruly futures.