Twenty years on: Reflections on the journeys travelled and future directions for tourist studies

Abstract

As founding, past and current editors, we are very excited to welcome you to this special issue celebrating the 20th anniversary of Tourist Studies. In 2001, this journal was established in what the founding editors, Franklin and Crang (2001), called an ‘exciting and challenging time for work on tourism’ (p. 1). In their inaugural editorial, they questioned the apparent trajectory of tourist studies at the beginning of the 21st century, puzzled because at a time of exciting scholarship in such transdisciplinary fields as mobility studies and cosmopolitanism, they felt that ‘tourism studies had become stale, tired, repetitive and lifeless’ (p. 5). Much research identified multiple variants of the tourist quest for authenticity, and expressed a preoccupation with self-aware post-tourists who commented cynically about the constructed attractions that they beheld. Indeed, tourism was often understood as something undertaken while away from home as tourists entered exciting, liminal holiday realms in which they could become satiated with alterity before once more slipping safely back into their mundane, everyday worlds. ...