Unlearning Qualitative Inquiry

Call for Papers – Unlearning Qualitative Inquiry

Journal: Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism Education
Publisher: Elsevier
Impact Factor: 4.1
CiteScore: 10.6
Submission deadline: 15 October 2026

This special issue challenges the marginalisation, misuse, and method‑centric teaching of qualitative inquiry in hospitality, tourism, leisure, sport, recreation, gastronomy, and related fields. “Unlearning Qualitative Inquiry” calls for a deeply reflexive, pedagogically grounded re‑examination of how qualitative methods are taught, mentored, and practised. It invites contributions that expose the messiness, ethical tensions, and philosophical underpinnings of qualitative work, and that serve as practical guides for educators and students.

Why this issue matters

• Qualitative research in hospitality and tourism education is often treated as secondary to quantitative paradigms, reduced to technical checklists, and stripped of epistemological and reflexive depth.

• The “unlearning” framing signals a need to let go of rigid assumptions—such as tidy methods, over‑prescribed designs, and neutral researcher positions—and to embrace critical, situated, and ethical practice.

• The SI aims to create an accessible compendium of resources and critical dialogues that help re‑centre qualitative inquiry as rigorous, generative, and essential to the field.

Core themes and expected contributions

Submissions must go beyond empirical reporting and explicitly connect qualitative work to pedagogy, theory, ethics, and methodology. Suitable topics include:

• Critical reflections on qualitative inquiry

  • Diagnosing and troubleshooting misconceptions, method‑centrism, and epistemological conflicts in hospitality and tourism scholarship.

  • How qualitative research is institutionally devalued and what can be done to re‑centre it.

• Teaching and mentoring qualitative methods

  • Educators’ accounts of designing courses, supervising projects, and navigating student anxieties around qualitative research.

  • Innovative approaches to teaching reflexivity, ethics, access, and representation without oversimplifying complexity.

• Student and early‑career perspectives

  • First‑person narratives of learning to “do” qualitative research, including failures, ethical dilemmas, and methodological pivots.

  • “How I became a qualitative inquirer”‑style pieces that highlight subject position, privilege, and vulnerability.

• Behind‑the‑scenes qualitative work

  • Honest depictions of data collection messiness, unexpected field dilemmas, and analytical dead‑ends that rarely appear in finished manuscripts.

  • How crises, surprises, or power‑asymmetries in fieldwork reshape research design and ethical practice.

• Epistemology, ontology, and methodology

  • Reflexive discussions of knowing, meaning‑making, and “being in the field” across standpoints such as poststructural, postmodern, new materialism, feminist, queer, intersectional, decolonial, and Indigenous frameworks.

  • Critical engagements with narrative inquiry, case study, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, autoethnography, visual methods, mixed‑methods, and participatory action research.

Submissions that present only standard qualitative empirical studies—without explicit reflection on process, pedagogy, or methodology—will be considered out of scope.

Guest editors

• Dr Kai‑Sean Lee, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA

• Dr Stefanie Kate Benjamin, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA

• Dr Hongping Zhang, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA

• Dr Swechchha Subedi, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA

• Dr Shawn Bucher, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA

Submission details

• Submission platform: Elsevier Editorial Manager for JOHLSTE:
  https://submit.elsevier.com/JOHLSTE

• When submissions open on 31 January 2026, select article type “VSI: Unlearning Qualitative Inquiry” to link manuscripts to the special issue.

• Submission window: 31 January 2026 – 15 October 2026

• Authors must follow the journal’s Guide for Authors and ensure their work contributes to qualitative pedagogy, methodological understanding, or critical practice rather than generic findings.

This special issue is ideal for educators, supervisors, and qualitative researchers in hospitality, tourism, leisure, sport, and related domains who wish to share method‑critical, reflective, and pedagogically useful work that can reshape how qualitative inquiry is taught and valued.

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