Phiona Stanley

• PhD
• Associate Professor at Edinburgh Napier University

A contribution to critical work in hospitality, this article theorizes gendered power relations in various homestay settings. As such, it is an endorsement of – and response to – Shelagh Mooney’s call for critical problematization of ‘gender’, not least as a lens to better understanding the hospitality experiences of – and research approaches to –...

This study considers cultural adaptation through tourism, focusing on language-travelers: hybrid education-tourism consumers whose voices remain relatively silent in tourism studies. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with students, teachers, and managers in Australian English language schools to understand what language-travel...

Alex Roddie (2021, p.25) sets himself a challenge: to hike Scotland’s Cape Wrath Trail alone, in winter, and without communications technology. And then, almost immediately, his tent floods and he calls home for backup. He writes: As I packed up my sodden gear and stuffed it into my sodden rucksack, I couldn’t shake a sense of failure; that in rea...

Discursive, netnographic and visual methods have been applied in the past to critique self-images, providing insight into the behaviours of tourists. However, such studies have ignored reactions to self-image posts on social media, and particularly to those that are captured within sites of atrocity. Based on an analysis of Instagram, and drawing o...

While much has been written to guide early career researchers (ECRs) and those charged with socializing them into academic ontologies, much less is known about ECRs’ own experiences of becoming academic. This article presents a narrative, new-materialist account—drawing on Facebook updates and personal diaries—of one ECR’s experience. Interdiscipli...

The authors of this essay ventured into the Scottish outdoors together for the weekend in September 2020. They made fires to gather ’round in the early autumn darkness. Here they return to these fires as they introduce the essays in this collection, writing their way into what stays with them, what changed (with) them, what continues to change (wit...

This paper explores the idea of “enclosures” as encircling lines. These include semantic boundaries, insider-outsider binaries, and the gray area that includes the technically illegal and the rarely actually prosecuted, focusing on “wild” campervanning in the Scottish Highlands. Also considered are non-enclosures: common grazing, faraway gazes for...

An Autoethnography of Fitting In: On Spinsterhood, Fatness, and Backpacker Tourism is a feminist narrative about the social rules of obedience and acquiescence to the norm – embodiment, heteronormativity, partnering – and about fitting in, or not, with those narratives. Phiona Stanley explores a period through her twenties and thirties, living and...

This paper critically examines epistemological, ontological, and axiological tensions of activism in three related contexts. These are, first, (primarily medical) volunteer tourism ideologies and practices in Central America, including U.S.-American teenagers volunteering in medical centers where, entirely untrained, they do sutures and injections,...

As a white, Scottish woman living on violently acquired, never-ceded Gadigal land on the east coast of what we now call Australia, I came to see that I was part of a big, unresolved problem. I understood this through engagement with Indigenous people and Indigenous scholarship, certainly. But it was mainly through hiking that I came to feel most vi...

This paper investigates a nascent, primarily online community of so-called ‘unlikely hikers’, united in the premise that hiking is good for everyone’s mental and physical health and that diversity can and should extend to outdoor spaces including national parks. However, the ways in which hikers have hitherto been represented in outdoors media, adv...

With a view to suggesting ways forward in qualitative ELT research, this chapter surveys two related fields of literature in order to question the taken-for-granted. The first field reviewed is ethnography and here the focus on its intellectual history and what is argued to be its potential for an ongoing “haunting” by a colonizing epistemology (wa...

This paper presents a multi-media textual collage that shows rather than tells the lived experiences of my conversion of a DIY campervan over several months in a diesel mechanic workshop in Sydney, Australia. This is a “small culture,” (Holliday, 1999) to which I gained limited access as I developed craft skills and the confidence to speak back to...

The premise that intercultural contact produces intercultural competence underpins much rationalization of backpacker tourism and in-country language education. However, if insufficiently problematized, pre-existing constructions of cultural 'otherness' may hinder intercultural competence development. This is nowhere truer than in contexts in which...

Tens of thousands of Western 'teachers', many of whom would not be considered teachers elsewhere, are employed to teach English in public and private education in China. Little has previously been known, except anecdotally, about their experiences, about the effect they have on education in the context, or on students' perceptions of 'the West' tha...