Best PhD Contribution Award at the International Association of Scientific Experts in Tourism Conference 2024 in Bozen
Institute of Marketing and Communication Management
The paper titled “Polyphonic case studies: the emergence of a dialogical methodology in tourism research” co-authored by Alessandra Pozzan, Nele Langebraun and Michael Gibbert has received the PhD Award at the 73rd conference of the International Association of Scientific Experts in Tourism.
This paper explores the different practices concerning how communities are defined in tourism research and which perspectives are communicated to the reader. Local communities have become increasingly relevant in sustainability-related studies in tourism, but they are far from homogeneous and hard to define. In this study, the authors illustrate how tourism researchers can refine the definition of local communities – by identifying multiple subcommunities instead of adopting a mere geographic definition – and how they can give voice to different perspectives within a community or among different ones by crafting a fictional dialogue in their papers. The study sheds light on the emergence of a polyphonic approach in tourism research and shows how tourism can become a trailblazer for other social sciences in empowering different actors and fostering more pluralistic research. Furthermore, this award strengthens and showcases the worth of the collaboration on tourism research between the Institute of Marketing and Corporate Communication (IMCA) and the Institute of Digital Technologies for Communication (ITDxC).
