Ben Stubbs







Travel writing and ethics: Experimentation, 'travelees' and community engagement

The subjective, creative and literary aspects of travel writing highlight the pronounced ethical dimension of the form that has existed since its inception (Fowler 2015). These broader ethical parameters should not be a cause for concern, however. They can act as a prompt to explore how the more open boundaries of travel writing can allow more meaningful engagement with communities and represented cultures. This paper will explore the experimental travel writing of Muecke, Jackson and Cixous, who use the techniques of fictocriticism, creative ethnography and memoir to observe how travel writing can act as an important contributor to the understanding of ‘the other’ and the communities outside our own in an era of increasingly fraught journalism production.

Keywords: community, ethics, experimentation, travelee, travel writing


References

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Note on the contributor

Ben Stubbs is a lecturer in journalism at the University of South Australia in Adelaide. He has also authored two travel writing books, essays, guides and various journal articles on the plurality of the form.