SPECIAL VOLUME - JOURNAL

The contribution of studies on tourism in pushing and moving beyond traditional ways of understanding tourism, bring rich theoretical and philosophical insights in highlighting the importance of exploring the multitude of meanings which inform our understanding/s in and of tourism. The articles in this Special Issue of Journal of Social Sciences illustrate how the area of study has become enriched by theoretical perspectives from multiple fields. The papers direct our gaze to nuanced scholarship that pays critical attention to both theory and in some instances ethnographic and empirical reference points. Many begin by questioning basic assumptions about tourism and the ways in which the subject is theorized and conceptualized. Naming this special issue ‘Tourism Studies in the Social Sciences’, is thus an attempt to meaningfully contribute to the intellectual conversation and further bring to the fore, scholarship that reveals the ever expanding intellectual landscape in tourism studies that is about both the conceptual and theoretical social science landscape of tourism, as well as about the people and their lives as they work and carve their livelihoods around (forms of) tourism. The contributors in this special issue variously inhabit and write from and within the fluidly understood and sometimes porous disciplinary domains of, geography, heritage studies, sociology and development studies and cultural anthropology and gender studies, and this special issue reflects as such, these broad social science and interdisciplinary perspectives.