Cultivating academic imagination in (and through) hospitality

It is always pleasantly surprising to find inspiration in unexpected places. Working in multi-disciplinary areas, meeting with colleagues from different fields and appreciating the importance of listening has presented countless opportunities to find new ideas and to stretch my imagination regarding the limits of my interests. However, I am also repeatedly astonished by the boundaries that colleagues choose to impose on how they engage with other concepts, methods and people. Two recent events in particular reminded me of these performed boundaries: both involved academic mailing lists and similar patterns of behaviours. In the first incident an early-career researcher posted a call for papers for the 2016 interdisciplinary Critical Hospitality Studies Symposium to a ‘dark-tourism’ mailing list (i.e. tourism activities and sites associated with suffering and/or death). Apparently a number of people unsubscribed from the list shortly after the call for papers was posted. Statisticians may warn us: correlations should not be taken as evidence of causation. Nevertheless, the list moderator announced to the remaining subscribers that he felt the post had ‘no relevance whatsoever to the membership [of the group]’ and ‘consequently, [he had] removed [the poster’s] membership from this list.’ In a similar incident, a well-established colleague announced a hospitality-focused seminar on a widely used tourism-centric mailing list. Another colleague, adopting a combative tone, challenged the appropriateness of publicising the event on an international tourism forum, whilst also questioning the connection to tourism more generally, stating that ‘a link to the relevance of tourism would be in order, wouldn’t it?’ Admittedly the symposium call for papers and the seminar abstract did not engage extensively with tourism (or dark tourism in the case of the former). 1 It is also possible to understand that in the first incident the moderator felt that the requests to unsubscribe threatened the sustainability of ‘his list’. However, this list does not receive many postings – most often 1-2 conference calls in a month, and there are frequently months when no-one posts to the list. Unlike other mailing lists, there are usually no exchanges or extended debates on this forum. One may question the intellectual commitment of people to the subject area and the ‘community’ if they disengaged with the (relatively quiet) forum after just one conference post. Nevertheless, both these incidents raised similar and more fundamental questions: why ask these questions or raise objections, and why do it in these ways?