emerge /əˈmərj/ verb gerund or present participle: emerging Move out of or away from something and come into view. become apparent, important, or prominent; become known; recover from or survive a difficult or demanding situation; break out from an egg, cocoon, or pupal case.

 

In this workshop we will consider the process and politic of being and becoming an emerging scholar, and how this (sometimes imposed) identity comes to be spatially, temporally, materially, and discursively situated. Often used as a shorthand for scholars who are early-career, students, newly hired, or without a permanent job or title, being an emerging scholar seems to be linked to a temporal and experience-related location: still learning, and still on the job market. But the terminology of emerging also evokes a mobile, mutable, and worldmaking (Hollinshead, 2012) quality: emergence marks an orientation toward continuous learning and evolution, as well as a desire to break out and away from institutional norms and traditions. 

And so we wonder: Through what means are certain scholars labeled as emerging? Where are we emerging from? Where are we emerging to? Does one ever stop emerging? Can one re-emerge? How do institutional norms put limits on emergence? How might we resist these norms in order to position emergence as an ongoing process, and one that is necessary for doing critical work in the field of tourism? 

The format of this workshop will require participants to reflect individually and collectively on the process and politic of being or becoming an emerging scholar. Over a time period of 1.5 hours we plan to put to work creative, narrative, reflective, and postdisciplinary (Hollinshead, 2012) tactics to consider the multiple nuanced, complementary, and conflicting ways in which we configure emergence. Through our collective reflections, we aim to engender hopeful orientations to thinking about, embodying, and welcoming forever-emerging critical tourism scholars and scholarship in a world that might expect us, one day, to have “finished” our emergence.

 We welcome anyone who self-identifies as an emerging scholar to participate in this workshop.