Creating tourism Knowledge in a hyper-connected world

This session is inspired by the question of knowing about tourism and the different ways of knowing in the hyper-connected world. Knowledge is a key construct in understanding and developing the field and as such a debated one. In the hyper-connected world, the ways of creating and using information and knowledge are complex, dynamic and power-laden. The session aims to explore consequences of interactivity and connectedness to tourism knowledge as a socially plural construct that is created, negotiated, used and interpreted in various contexts of tourism. The nature of tourism knowledge, how it is produced and what its consequences are, becomes an ever more important issue inside tourism research. In the context of hyper-connectedness, knowledge produced and relating to tourism call for an exploration of different ways of knowing. This panel invites papers that consider research as a mobile practice of collaboration, thus challenging conventional presumptions about the position of the researcher as an objective observer able to representing the true state of the world.

This is not the least relevant in the case of Tourism Studies in which the basic variable are people that journey and thus, it is obvious that we as a researchers journey with them, creating knowledge through mobile connections. Moreover, not only do people journey, but also environments, places, attractions and other more-than-human materials in which the researcher gets entangled through the processes and practices of doing research. As such research is a relational process. Taking its cue from Tim Ingold's (2010) description of the link between knowing and being, we 'know as we go along' we encourage participants to engage with issues of more-than representational methods, collaborative ways of knowing, values in research and politics of knowledge creation to name few examples. Both conceptual and empirically based papers are welcomed that address issues such as:

• Responsiveness and responsibility of research
• Connectedness and intersubjectivity
• Collaborative knowledge creation
• Fieldwork practices and knowledge dissemination
• Making knowledge matter
• Creating tourism knowledge
• Power relations of knowledge
• Information and/or knowledge 
• Movement of knowledge
• Non-connected knowledge