Dominant Tourism Educational and Research Reasoning: A Critique to Portugal’s Case

Abstract

In this article, we present a reflexive criticism of the Portuguese university-level tourism education by analyzing CAEs’ evaluations (External Evaluation Commissions) that the A3ES (https://www.a3es.pt/) has been doing at bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degree level in Tourism courses. In our analysis, we underline the role of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in curriculums and CAEs’ subjective appraisals that reduce tourism to a technical, managerial, mercantile, and neoliberal research exercise, following academic capitalist principles. The proposed multidisciplinary of two CAE reports stand as examples of a discourse that camouflages a practice of exclusion, blocking a truly multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approach, and the opportunity to consider the potential of partnership between tourism studies research reasoning and other related disciplines and approaches. This has reduced tourism training and education to a homogeneous, monodisciplinary, reductionism, endogamic, quantitative, and positivist practice, recognizing only hyperspecialized educational models and tourism curriculums as valid. CAEs’ abusive promotion of a technical and managerial specialization of tourism professionals dismisses those that establish interdisciplinary partnerships between tourism and other fields of knowledge which favor a complex humanistic training.

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