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Forcibly displaced people like refugees and asylum-seekers can be socio-culturally integrated in receiving societies through tourism. Our poststructuralist approach to ethics explains this potential as we combine three concepts: Zygmunt Bauman’s “strangerhood”, Emmanuel Levinas’ “ethical responsibility”, and Jacques Derrida’s “hostipitality”. We draw on the initiative of a social enterprise in the English city of Leeds which encourages displaced people to contribute as tour-guides. During 2017 and 2019 we conducted in-depth individual and focus-group interviews with refugees, asylum-seekers, and public sector stakeholders to examine integration of displaced people via tourism. Findings highlight that contributing to the tourism sector, individual refugees and asylumseekers are provided with a meaningful platform for self-representation moving beyond tokenistic notions of participation, and become co-creators of diverse and inclusive societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leisure-led regional development refers to leisure as a mechanism to achieve broad societal goals within a region: economic revenue, employment and service levels but also cultural or conservationist ambitions. Engaging in such leisure-led regional development proves a complex matter. Based on ethnographies of leisure in the Dutch province of Fryslân conducted over a five-year period between 2013 and 2018, this paper argues that combining theoretical understanding of complexity theories with analyses based on both evolutionary and discursive approaches results in enhanced understanding of the interactions shaping uncertainty in leisure development. Results of field observations, interviews, participation and document analysis show that planning for leisure-led regional development should consider autonomous and evolutionary processes, whilst focusing on purposefully influencing the interactions and perspectives of actors in leisure. More precisely, this means shaping the narratives and practices in these institutions which make specific interactions more likely to develop. This can be undertaken by including in planning efforts the individual perspectives and emotions among actors in the regional leisure sector. To cope with uncertainty at the heart of leisure-led regional development, an adaptive strategy should be adopted, both in the planning efforts taken and in how such efforts are monitored and evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflections on meanings of life and death are rarely comfortable or linear, and can be triggered by crises and disasters. This study explores the meanings of dark tourism sites for residents, including their visitation motives, and subsequent reflections on death and life. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 37 residents of Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand, following the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. Our findings suggest that visits to disaster sites that have dark tourism connotations trigger mortality salience, prompting residents to reflect on memories of the disaster, which are often accompanied by deep and meaningful reflections on death and meaning in life, nostalgia for the past, and the significance of the sites themselves. We argue that dark tourism sites provide spaces for residents to assess and address socio-emotional distress caused by disasters. We suggest that interpretations of disaster-related dark tourism sites should memorialise death and disaster, but should also celebrate the lives of survivors. In this way, dark tourism sites can take on a more productive role in facilitating individual and community coping with post-disaster recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disruption and creativity are the two ideas around which we challenge and contribute to dismantling white, 'western', neoliberal hegemonic social narratives and ideologies in qualitative tourism methodologies. In tourism studies in general, and tourism geography in particular, the last decade has witnessed an emphasis on qualitative methodological research, both in terms of the topics addressed and the types of methodological tools. In many ways, this legitimisation of qualitative work mirrors developments in other areas such as human geography, sociology and anthropology. Explorations in this Special Issue contribute critical understandings of the responsibility of tourism research to be disruptive first before it can engender progress and transformation within and outside of our field. Authors debate in more depth how tourism studies can offer multidimensional, multilogical and multiemotional, methodological approaches to tourism research. This Special Issue contributors tackle the ways in which research methodologies can be creative and disruptive to the seemingly prevalent narratives within tourism studies. To further expand tourism methodologies, authors have engaged in debates about deep reflexivity, subjectivities, and dreams; messy emotions in auto-ethnographic accounts of fieldwork; 'motherhood capital' accessing Inuit communities; collective memory work in tourism research and pedagogy; ethnodrama and creative non-fiction; linguistic narrative analysis, and serious gaming, amongst others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual article brings to the attention of tourism scholars new possibilities to theorize dark tourism as an affective socio-spatial encounter. To do so, we frame dark tourism within theories of affect and, in particular, geographies of affect. We show how debates around dark tourism terminology and taxonomies, in most cases underlie considerations on felt, affective aspects of the dark tourism experience. We critically debate the concept of affect, the distinctions between affects and emotions, and the complex issue of representability of affect. Our perspective is underpinned by a necessity to consider the context and limitations that frame the affective experience of the tourist and the resulting encounters. This offers a deeper layer of understanding tourists' experiences in death and disaster places as well as the political and ethical charge imbued in such encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes methodological discussions on collecting and analysing international tourists' affects and emotions. The method of data collection used is electronic mail interviews, in some instances corroborated by participant observation in the field, whereas the methods of data analysis employed are affective mapping and emotionality of texts. Such methods of analysis capture the on-flow and contingency of the tourist's experience in post-disaster places. E-mail interviews are becoming an increasingly widespread method of data collection. In post-disaster contexts, the potential of email interviews allows researchers to conduct fieldwork even when they cannot obtain face-to-face interviews, or in cases in which participants feel more at ease answering from their home and can take their time to respond. Twelve semi-structured e-mail interviews have been conducted in 2016 with international tourists who visited the Tohoku region, Japan, hit in 2011 by a triple disaster: an earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. To explore and better understand participants' affective and emotional experiences, we exemplify affective mapping and emotionality of texts drawing on tools like linguistic features of e-mails, imagework, short stories and anecdotes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Desire is a continuous force, fundamentally eccentric and insatiable, yet insufficiently explored in tourism studies. To examine desire in tourism to ‘unusual’ places of darkness and danger we propose four interpretations of this psychoanalytic concept: desire as recognition, ‘object’ cause of desire, desire for novelty, and desire for fantasy. Initial empirical evidence drawn from analysing online mass-media accounts of tourists in North Korea suggests that tourists access desire when travelling to such a country portrayed as one of the most reclusive, dangerous and feared in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A response from the author of the article "‘Shining light on the darkness. Placing tourists within North Korean tourism" in the 2017 issue is presented.