Researchers as Travellers and Storytellers

Researchers are, in many ways, travellers and storytellers whose journeys across landscapes, disciplines, and cultures offer profound opportunities for discovery, reflection, and connection within contemporary cultural studies. Drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives including literary studies, media studies, and cultural geography, this collection demonstrates how travel becomes a site of learning when approached with openness, transforming research into a dialogic process between self and other, between here and elsewhere. The contributions explore how storytelling bridges worlds, translating experience into meaning and making scholarship not only analytical but affective and human. From literary tourism in South Africa to digital storytelling in Antarctica, from festival cultures in Vanuatu to heritage tourism at the Great Wall, these researcher-travellers craft narratives that reveal the material and symbolic processes of meaning-making in spaces of encounter. This volume will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in cultural studies, media studies, tourism studies, literary studies, and cultural geography, as well as scholars working in participatory research methodologies and narrative inquiry. The collection also serves as a valuable resource for postgraduate courses exploring research methodologies, cultural tourism, and the intersection of travel and academic practice. The articles in this book were originally published in various issues of Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies.

Lauren Dyll is a National Research Foundation-rated scholar and Associate Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal with research interests in cultural heritage and tourism, participation, identity and knowledge production. She is co-chair of the Participatory Communication Research Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research, and is co-editor of the journal, Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies. Keyan G Tomaselli is Distinguished Professor, Humanities, University of Johannesburg, and founder and co-editor of Critical Arts. His applied research on cultural tourism from the perspectives of both subjects and tourists is widely published and impactful of actual ventures across South Africa.

Introduction: resesarchers as travellers and storytellers Part 1: Travelling as research journeys 1. Hitting the hot spots: literary tourism as a research field with particular reference to KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa 2. Crossing the road in Macao 3. Colliding human-animal trajectories (road kill!) on a Tasmanian journey 4. Reading running Part 2: Literary, storytelling, self-imaging 5. 'We want to see something different (but not too different)': spatial politics and the Pink Loerie Mardi Gras in Knysna 6. The researcher's guide to Ethiopia: what travel guides don't tell you 7. 'Back to my roots': artifak and festivals in Vanuatu, Southwest Pacific 8. Live Aid/8: perpetuating the superiority myth 9. Digital storytelling Antarctica 10. Conflicting images of the Great Wall in cultural heritage tourism 11. Shanghai cosmopolis: negotiating the branded city 12. Memory, multiplicity, and participatory curation at the District Six Museum, Cape Town