Attuning to affect and emotion in tourism studies

Affect and emotion permeate all levels of the everyday and extra-ordinary entanglements of travel and tourism with personal, collective and political life. With this Special Issue, we consolidate an emerging approach and establish a route for scholarship that explores these entanglements. Through a range of theoretical and empirical lenses, the contributors reveal what emotion does in tourism, tourism practices, and tourism studies. Attuning to affect and emotion in tourism studies we steer the affective turn already underway in cultural studies and geography so as to encompass touring bodies and tourism places. Engaging the concept of affect as a constitutive element of social life often leaves us grasping for terminology to describe something that is, by its very nature, beyond words. For this reason, as we see in some of the papers in this collection, studying affect poses a significant and fruitful challenge to the status quo of social scientific method and analysis. Along with the contributors to this Special Issue, we make a case for thinking about emotions and affects through ‘collective practice’ as interrelated shaping tourism encounters in and with places. That is, to break it down as doing and as shared between bodies (and places) through the doing.