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Pratt and Watts 2000, p. 840). What we thus seek to answer is how come
that not even geographers, coming from a discipline which means
precisely “earth writing” (Gren 1994) and “which has a protracted record
of published tourism scholarship dating back to the 1920s” (Coles, Hall
and Duval 2006, p. 296), seem to be unable to resist the temptation of the
social? Our research agenda may be read as a tentative plea for an explicit
theoretical re-cognition of the Earth in tourism studies.
Setting this agenda is however also relevant in the context of the
second objective of the report, that it should be able to be read and used as
an educational text in tourism studies at undergraduate level. We
recognise that at any given time, a student in tourism studies will learn, as
though instinctively, what is admissible. To become educated in the field is
to acquire this knowledge of what is admissible, often implicitly. This selfregulation,
or set of feedbacks in the network of educational relations,
makes up the main constraint for anyone wishing to become a scholar of
tourism (Serres 1995, p. 104). With an earthly research agenda we want to
add to the fundament which defines the validity of the learned procedure
of the tourism student.
The chapter begins with a return to our original point of departure;
images, which are elaborated in the context of tourist and tourism
imaginationings. After that we revisit tourism studies in order to pave the
way to a section where we demonstrate how tourism theory can be moved
beyond social theory. In particular we are interested in how the Earth has
been erased through mapping tourism and tourists onto the reference plane
of the social and the possibilities to recapture the Earth and non-humans in
tourism theory. We end thus with a brief a note on earthly methodology.
Still images - on the move
Our investigations began with images in tourism and have on several
occasions skirted what we now would like to refer to as the “visual
paradox of tourism studies”. On the one hand this paradox means that
tourism is indeed full of the visual, including visual technologies, and there
is also little doubt that the visual part of tourist experiences is highly
significant (Urry 1990, Crouch and Lübbren 2003). On the other hand, and
in spite of the just mentioned importance of the visual in tourism:
image based-research methods are simply not on the agenda for many
tourist researchers” (Feighey 2003, p. 78).
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