Emerging from the shadows of the COVID-19 pandemic and building back better: Tourist Studies and Asian critical tourism scholarship

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism economies in Asia were booming in ways unimagined previously. References to ‘The Asian Century’, a term invented by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to proclaim the foreseeable economic triumph of the continent, signalled the traction gained by tourism research on Asia in terms of the quantity of articles published in international as well as domestic platforms (Sin et al., 2021). ‘Asia’ is a tricky term. The cultural and economic diversity of Asia and its imprecise and contested borders make definitions a daunting task, yet shared challenges and opportunities do unite Asia as a constellation of peoples and places. While the coronavirus disease in 2020 put a stop both to the momentum of Asian tourism and tourism research underway at the time, in 2023 at Tourist Studies we now see possibilities emerging from the painful shadows of the pandemic – possibilities to build back the scholarship theoretically, methodologically and empirically. Tourism scholarship in Asia started off on the backs of Anglo-western concepts and methodologies (Winter, 2009). On top of cultural and societal mismatches between the 1157932 TOU0010.1177/14687976231157932Tourist StudiesOng and Frohlick editorial2023