From Disciplinarity to Postdisciplinarity: Tourism Studies Dedisciplined

Inter- and transdisciplinarity are currently experiencing real development within the national and international university landscape. Moreover, they now feature explicitly on the agendas of political and academic organizations that promote and fund scientific research. The increasing focus on interdisciplinarity in the sciences and humanities, in general, and tourism studies, in particular, reflects an awareness of the complexity of research, which is increasingly confronted with social issues that require dialogue between the institutionalized disciplines. Today, the rooted disciplines face a crisis in meeting the ambitions and expectations of many researchers who question both the potential and limits of their own disciplines and the ways in which they can establish new connections with other disciplines. This article aims to explore the implications of a possible postdisciplinary era in which knowledge would be constructed on the ruins of disciplines from a disciplinary or antidisciplinary perspective. I try to define "postdisciplinarity" and its links to inter- and transdisciplinarity and show how they can be similar or, conversely, dissimilar. In a more consensual vein, I show how it is possible to reconcile the desire to end disciplines and the need to take them into account—or even rethink them. Tourism studies are taken here as a prototypical example of the integration between and beyond disciplines with a view to analyzing and understanding the complexity of tourism activities.