We welcome presentations of knowledge production that deal with postdisciplinarity in relation to the topics of freedom, art and power in the context of tourism.

 

Researchers are invited to present their knowledge production in the form of research papers, movies or audiovisual material, exhibitions, performances, music, literary writings such as poetry or short stories and other creative products. A combination of several of these forms of expression is also very much welcome. We recognise that there are a number of different ways in which research can be communicated, and we are committed to accommodating the needs of individual expressions.

 

FREEDOM

Live dangerously! was Nietzsche’s exhortation to the lovers of knowledge. Postdisciplinarity is an invitation to think dangerously!  and to create a space where we can rethink tourism beyond usual disciplinary conventions and delimiting genres. In these times of academic obsession with rankings and performance metrics, we aim to recover playfulness, regain freedom and independence, the joy of reconnecting our personal existence with our knowledge production and academic life. This is an invitation to follow your individual passion and take risks. There are multiple paths to achieve excellence and rigor in research.  It is a call to recover the experimental and unconventional in our writings, our teaching and in our interpretations.

 

ART

Postdisciplinarity explores the interlinkages between art and knowledge production. The academic endeavour is one of making sense of the world around us to help building a better one. There is an epistemic territory that moves across and beyond disciplinary borders which is the art of sense making. In this conference we ask ourselves if the truths about humanity and the world are at times better and more accurately expressed through art than through our academic disciplines. What can we learn from art? How can art contribute to our research and education? We question the disciplinary silos, the genres and formal limitations through which academics are requested to express themselves. The passion for wanting to know about the world respects no boundaries. We want to explore the fluid interrelationship between artistic creativity and academic creativity.

 

POWER

We operate within systems of disciplinary powers and in an era where knowledge is power. Habermas showed us how knowledge production is interest bound. While knowledge can be emancipatory, it is often used for domination and control. Foucault invited us to reflect upon which subjects do we turn into objects of knowledge and what are our techniques of domination, governance and discipline. In this conference we ask - Who do we serve with our knowledge? Who do we have at heart when producing tourism research? What are the consequences of disciplinary strictures? What do we want tourism education for? Postdisciplinarity invites us to question different voices in the research process and search for the silences and the absences in our academic systems. This conference is an invitation to engage with these questions and to reflect upon the dimensions of power and ethics, which are embedded in our knowledge production and our lives.

 

POSTDISCIPLINARITY

surpasses the boundaries of disciplinary thinking and opens up the possibility to question the established phenomena – touristic or otherwise – we take for granted. It does not claim that disciplinarity is essentially wrong, but it shows that disciplinary silos limit our capacity to make sense of the world and aims to make the subject of study less embedded in that system of thought. Postdisciplinarity is an epistemological endeavour that speaks of knowledge production and the ways in which the world of physical and social phenomena can be known. It is also an ontological discourse as it concerns what we call ‘tourism’. Postdisciplinarity, as we see it, is an invitation to various interpretations, critical analysis, and creative problem solving. It extends to questioning conventional norms and processes of knowledge production, as well as challenging the environments that confine the scope and limits of what is possible, relevant, desirable and even credible.