47 HERETICAL THINKING IN TOURISM – Contributions by Freya Higgins-Desbiolles
47 HERETICAL THINKING IN TOURISM – Contributions by Freya Higgins-Desbiolles
Perhaps for any of us to write of hope, to write of love, we must learn once more to be free and embrace heresy. And for that to happen we must every day write ourselves out of the literature of silence.
We all come from something and, equally, need to be liberated from that same thing…
That I am not one. That I am not alone. That I am free.
– Richard Flanagan (2021)
I think I may be a heretic in my work on tourism, understanding heresy as described here by Australian author and public intellectual Richard Flanagan. This must be apparent to many in the tourism academy from the years of Trinet controversies and debates; but if not from that, then in the publication entitled “The War over Tourism” (2021). I made the choice to be an activist academic from the very beginning. This decision arose from my positioning in development and development education prior to becoming a tourism academic in Australia. But it also arose from my personal positioning too. I grew up on an island off the coast of North Carolina where second-home tourism had an irrevocable impact on my home and its people. This was in the American South and I grew up attentive to race relations from a very early age. I also experienced the violent misogyny that women endure from a young age and experienced career pathways being cut off largely due to gender dynamics (my original expertise was in international relations and terrorism). It is for these reasons that activism became a life commitment, and despite being warned early on against an activist approach, I have not strayed very far from this chosen activist path. In my view, we must speak up and act for justice, but this must be grounded in critical, reflexive thought and in engagement with others.
The theory of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) presses us to recognise that one can simultaneously belong to both privileged and oppressed groups. I am aware of how this theory applies to my work and positioning. I am amongst the privileged in the USA and in Australia by being a settler on stolen lands and also as a scholar until recently employed with tenure in the university. However, I am both oppressed and disadvantaged as a person who identifies as a woman, coming from a working-class background and now as someone living with health disabilities.
I am growing increasingly interested in these ideas of oppression, whiteness, intersectionality, emancipation and resistance. I grew up in a culture where white supremacy was so much the norm that it shaped every aspect of our society and interactions. But stepping back to observe more globally, it is clear that conceptualisations of supremacy and the lust for power that drives these are the source of the multiple troubles we now confront- supremacy of humans over nature, of men over women, of humans over animals, of adults over youth, and so on. The emphasis on tourism interests and tourism as industry thinkin