Qualitative tourism research: Opportunities in the emergent soft sciences

•Distils the rich opportunities existing in the emergent ‘soft sciences’ today.•Encourages more innovative applications of qualitative approaches/methods in tourism.•Reviews emanative qualitative approaches regarding their interpretive capacities.•Critiques use of reflexive, embedded, emic, and ‘non-expert’ research approaches in tourism.

A liberation in ‘soft science’ inquiry over recent decades has opened up ontological, epistemological and methodological opportunities, but this empowerment is often under-recognised in investigations of tourism. While qualitative inquiry has made significant advances within tourism studies, scholars can gain richly by continuing to cultivate forms of critical multilogicality, and by embracing some of the methods and approaches on offer elsewhere across the broader (soft) social sciences. This paper thereby advances a set of key conceptual principles which guide emergent soft science thinking; it reviews their applicability within tourism studies through a probative ‘tableau’ of qualitative approach exemplars.