Experimental travel : in practice; as performance

Abstract

This doctoral research, initially inspired by contact with The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel, is an exploratory foray into the realm of "experimental travel". While a complex history of experimentation is implicit in its practice, "experimental travel" is extricated from the temporally and spatially limited paradigm of "conducting an experiment", and rather argued to be processual, created through fluid, contingent, relational performances in space. Experimentalism in tourism abounds, from random methods of exploring new or foreign places, to infusing touristic practice with playful, chance-based or competitive components. Indeed, positioning "experimental travel" as a category of tourism is argued to be too limited and prescriptive a framework. Rather, diverse practices such as rolling dice to make decisions while travelling, to taking a toy on a journey as a "mascot", to participating in hitchhiking competitions are drawn together through their demonstration of an attitude to experimentality. "Experimental travel" is essentially creative, inherently embodied, and its encounters are imbricated in the everyday, both in the context of de-differentiation of home and away as well as the quotidian that accompanies any journey. Like all touristic performance, "experimental travel" harbours the potential to transform any space into "" an often fleetingly "" touristic place. As there is currently no academic scholarship investigating the nexus of tourism-experimentalism, this thesis is interdisciplinary, non-traditional in approaches to both structure and methodology. Tourists are important: not solely because they represent a fundamental component of the largest industry in the world, but because travel styles reflect broader cultural and social shifts. They are metaphors of the social world, and the practice of infusing creative, experimental performativities in touristic encounters is meaningful. This doctoral study traces these meanings, while simultaneously exploring possibilities of "experimental travel" in the contexts of future tourism research.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English