Cultivating Proximities: Re-visiting the Familiar

In this contribution, we explore how proximity may be cultivated as a way to re-experience and retell tourism and how research might become more sensitive to modest and mundane tourism practices. By doing so, we wish to interfere with common binaries in the tourism studies literature, such as home and away and ordinary and extraordinary. Based on our personal experiences from places close to our hearts, we ask: How may we cultivate proximity as part of our research methodology to enact-through-knowing and care for (alternative) tourism? How may we cultivate collaborative ways of knowing tourism while at a distance? We invite you to two places close to our hearts, places that are—at first glance—mundane and unexceptional, to experiment with alternative methodologies. We make use of postcards from these places as probes to revisit the tourist gaze and the tourist experience, enacting these familiar places through alternative means. The postcard narratives exemplify how proximity can help us cultivate modest and situated tourism research practices and enact places and landscapes as tourism sites in proximate and sensitive ways.