Travel and the travelogue as innovative research methodology: knowledge creation for advancing urban health and health equity in the 21^st century

Introduction

New methodologies and knowledge creation are at the forefront of advancing urban health and health equity in the 21^st century (Grant et al. 2017, Grant and Thompson 2018). There is growing interest in new paradigms about mobility and space in social life, characterised as the ‘mobility turn’ and the ‘spatial turn’ (Sheller and Urry 2006, Hein et al. 2008). Cities & Health has been commendably innovative in encouraging articles involving travel around cities, thereby supporting the creation of knowledge outside conventional academic practices. Excellent examples include Gill’s (2019) visits to cities in Europe and Canada to report on child-friendly urban planning, Selamet’s (2022) walking and driving in Kuwait to photograph street views of fast-food displays, and Davey’s (2022) trip around Bangkok to critically reflect on the design of no-smoking signs. These examples break with convention by bringing travel and travel writing by the researcher into the research process.

In this editorial, I introduce the travelogue as a new research methodology. I begin by outlining the key features of a travelogue and how they can be put together as a research methodology, by drawing upon a rich history of documented travel dating back to antiquity, and upon the empirical nature of health and social science research. Next, I guide you through the steps involved in conducting a travelogue study from start to finish, illustrated with an example about cities and health to exemplify what it looks like in practice and what can be achieved. Since travel, travel writing, and ‘travel research methods’ are neglected and under-theorised in the literature, this editorial has important theoretical and practical implications.

Travel and the travelogue

The word ‘travelogue’ is often used synonymously with travel writing or with a distinctive type of travel account or film. As a portmanteau of ‘travel’ and ‘monologue’, it is commonly taken to mean the narration of the actions and experiences of travelling, and the sights and peoples and places encountered, along with supporting visual material such as photographs, film, and now digital and social media. A narrative voice chronicling the writer’s personal encounters and perspectives of travelling, typically a first-person account and in the style of an autobiography or a memoir, distinguish a travelogue from other forms of travel writing such as the guide book.

The travelogue developed from a rich history of travel communication dating back to oral tradition in prehistory and ancient parietal art and texts such as the biblical canon. Personal stories of travel have been published since the early modern era and European exploration and discovery, aided by the invention and spread of the printing press; well-known examples include Marco Polo’s account in 1300 of travels through Asia, Columbus’s letter in 1493 announcing the existence of the American continent and its peoples, and published narratives of Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the world from 1577 to 1580 (Hulme and Youngs 2007, Thompson 2011). Travel writing continued to develop in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the records of explorers, colonial officials, merchants, missionaries, army and naval officers, pilgrims, settlers, and travellers engaged in colonization, global trade, science, missionary work, and the mapping and surveying of the globe’s geography, people, and nature (Hulme and Youngs 2007). Accounts of local travel also became popular in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century and interwar years (Das and Youngs 2019, Thompson 2019).

Travel literature has been well illustrated since the eighteenth century with drawings, engravings, paintings, and lithographs of architecture, topography, people, and exotic fauna and flora (Alù and Hill 2018). Photography came to be the norm in the late nineteenth century onwards amid its increasing availability (Smith 2013).

Whereas the earliest accounts of travel tended to document erudition, objective facts, knowledge, and truths in an impersonal style, the adoption of narrative forms of writing such as travel diaries, journals, and letters in the late seventeenth century and eighteenth century, autobiography around the turn of the nineteenth century (Kinsley 2019) and literary impressionism in the twentieth century (Carr 2007), all germinated more personal and subjective forms of expression which captured the feelings, thoughts, and introspection of the writer. This was aided by increasing focus in travel writing on everyday life (Thompson 2019), travel for leisure rather than commercial and professional reasons (Carr 2007), and a close relationship between the development of travel writing and novel writing (Kinsley 2019). Throughout history, travel has been communicated in many forms including oral tales, books, ethnographic writing and film, essays, field notes, letters, logbooks, maps, memoirs, newspapers, novels (e.g. Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe), pamphlets, plays, poems, scientific literature, songs, visual art, and now digital and social media (Carr 2007, Hulme and Youngs 2007).

The travelogue methodology: a step-by-step guide

The characteristics of the travelogue can be developed into a systematic process for studying urban health and other topics. In this section of the editorial, I outline the ‘travelogue methodology’ with suggestions for getting started on your own study. I take you through each of the steps involved in carrying it out, starting with planning the journey and travel, through to collecting and analysing data, scrutinising selfhood, representation, and social responsibility, and writing and publishing.

Planning the journey and travel

A starting point is to plan the journey including its route, places (if any), objects and people to be visited and studied, and mode(s) of travel, based on the meanings and value they bring to the research topic and research question(s). The journey will depend on:

• what you are trying to find out, e.g. a health issue, practice, organisation, intervention, policy

• travel experiences you are interested in, e.g. walking, driving, biking, back-packing, pilgrimage

• how you are framing and approaching the topic, e.g. health as an object, action, identity, performance, process

• whether you want to examine sociality, visuality, and/or materiality.

It can be planned chronologically and sequentially along a route from beginning (e.g. setting out from home, arrival) to end (e.g. departure, return home), and with intermediary points (e.g. scenes, objects, places, people, themes, events, occasions, processes), or you can consider alternative approaches.

Even well-planned travelogues are emergent and open to modification (or even a complete overhaul!), since travel is often about exploring the unknown and unexpected in an iterative and reflexive process. For this reason, a finished itinerary is not necessary as it can unfold indiscriminately based on whatever comes your way, as the journey and research progress. For example, the stopping points in Davey’s (2022) essay on no-smoking signs in Bangkok were decided enroute while encountering informative signs.

The travel itinerary can focus on one city (e.g. Davey and Zhao 2021), several cities (e.g. Gill 2019) and other scales of space such as a district, town, community, organisation, and/or health intervention. When planning a travel itinerary, you can consider:

• how it comes together to form significance and meaning and travel experience

• social, material, and visual qualities relating to health or the phenomenon of interest

• connections between points in the journey, if any

• similarities or differences between points, to generate comparable or diverging perspectives

• logistical and pragmatic matters (e.g. accessibility, time, cost, ethics approval, constraints)

• cultural, economic, historical, and political concerns

• self-selection by participants

• opportunities to reflect on the Self (see below).

In the literature on urban health, a city is often taken to mean a physical entity or a spatial position (geographic coordinates)—an objective reality which you are located within or going to visit. A more nuanced understanding involves considering how a city (and your research topic) comes into being as a reality in the minds and practices of people and through a process social construction (Massey 2005, Davey and Zhao 2021). Also important is the meaning of travel and your perception of space and time (Massey 2005). Feel free to explore alternative notions of travel, spatiality, and temporality (Clift et al. 2021): online travel, virtual travel (e.g. in game worlds), fragmentary, fluid, and non-linear experiences, and ‘travel’ as a metaphor for conceptualising non-place processes (e.g. health as a journey, travel as self-discovery), all challenge common sense understandings of travel as physical movement through geographical space and chronological time.

Collecting and analysing data

A wide range of sampling, data collection, and data analysis methods are suitable for a travelogue study. Conventional methods might need to be modified, such as conducting interviews while exploring the city or while interviewees are going about their daily lives. Methodological creativity and innovation are encouraged, and there is a particular need to develop ‘travel research methods’ for detailing the intricacies of travel and its contribution to knowledge creation.

Autobiographical and narrative approaches such as diaries, drawings, emails, journals, letters, memoirs, music, photos/selfies, postcards, stories, and social media posts are ideal for storying travel experience, introspection, and reflexivity by the researcher. Qualitative data collection methods (e.g. focus groups, interviews) can also explore meanings, social realities, and experiences of participants (e.g. city residents), although quantitative methods and mixed-methods might sometimes be appropriate.

Visual research methods can capture considerable information about a city. Visual data such as photographs, drawings, and visual art can be created by the traveller, participants (e.g. photo-elicitation, photovoice, social media; Mysyuk and Huisman 2020), or both in collaboration. Pre-existing or historical images are obtainable from residents, archives, and other sources. Visual data should support and enrich research findings rather than only serve as window dressing. Other types of data you can collect in a travelogue study include field notes, journal entries, interview transcripts and narratives, street plans, maps, survey data, archival records, artefacts, memorabilia, souvenirs, audio-visual recordings (e.g. multimedia, music), sensory and perceptual aspects of travelling (e.g. smell, sound, body language), and contextual information. The vast literature and film on contemporary and historical travel in cities around the world (Das and Youngs 2019, Thompson 2019) constitutes a rich source of secondary data, as do geographic information systems (GIS) and online services such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Places API, and OpenStreetMap.

You can collect data while stationary or mobile, but a travelogue is more about travel by the researcher than about mobile participants (e.g. ‘go-alongs’; Kusenbach 2003). An array of qualitative data analysis methods can also be used within the travelogue framework, including content analysis, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis, thematic analysis, and narrative analysis, or even quantitative approaches. Though the travelogue is ideal for short visits, you can opt to stay for extended periods of time.

Engaging with selfhood, representation, and social responsibility

Situating travel and research within subjectivity and sense-making is paramount. This is not least because they involve the new and unfamiliar, the Self and the Other, and the privileged position of being able to travel and to write about it. Similarly, travel literature should be read critically to understand how it is shaped by the writer’s worldview, privilege, techniques of representation, preconceptions, biases, and ideologies, which can also yield novel sights into intersections between urban health and issues such as ethnicity, gender, geopolitics, inclusion, identity, power, race, religion, sexual orientation, and much else besides. Critical thinking also involves thinking through your own take on such issues as the reader.

Travel writing has a problematic legacy concerning the representation of identity, and the perpetuation of masculinity, racism, and social injustice; travelogues in nineteenth century, for example, were predicated on European moral and cultural superiority and non-European inferiority, exoticness, and primitiveness (Thompson 2011). Unfortunately, even ‘mainstream’ social science narratives today continue this oppression (see Davey et al. 2022). Therefore, the travelogue methodology involves reflexivity and looking inward at your sense of self and representations of others in relation to the research topic, by scrutinizing your assumptions, attitudes, rhetorical conventions, social categorisation, and socialisation shaping the research. It is worth looking at the nascent literature on decolonising the social sciences, travel writing in other countries and languages (e.g. women in India writing about their perception of the Other while visiting the United Kingdom; Chaudhuri 2019), and underrepresented and alternative narratives, for example, indigenous travel writing, gay travel writing, and women’s travel writing. Perspectives within critical health, cultural studies, gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, and post-colonial studies can also inform your writing.

A commitment to ethical travel writing also involves mitigating its impact on the environment and on climate change, for example, by measuring and offsetting a travelogue’s carbon footprint, or by linking its aims to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. While it does not have to be predicated on a moral or political agenda, the findings should at least furnish suggestions for improving health in cities or making a difference to the lives of others. Collaborating with community members, industry partners, participants, practitioners, and policy-makers will help to translate your travelogue into real world significance and enhance its validity through city planning and governance and policymaking.

Writing and publishing a travelogue

A travelogue has its own distinctive elements and styles, as outlined throughout this editorial. However, there are no set rules about its structure and content, and they will depend on the aims of the study, what exactly the writer is trying to do, and other requirements such as publication outlet.

Autobiographical and narrative and personal accounts offer a medium through which to present the researcher’s voice (see Douglas and Barnwell 2019). Episodic storytelling can help to organise the text around the journey’s itinerary and scenes and moments, or alternative styles can be used. The arrival scene is useful for framing the study, and a topographic or topological map of the route (and GIS data) can assist in laying out the story. While a travelogue is all about real-life experiences and writing in the first-person and second-person, a non-narrative, realist, and third-person account is also possible, especially if you collect any quantitative data.

Bear in mind that travel writing is read for enjoyment and pleasure and eye-witness accounts as much as for new information about a topic. Feel free to mix-and-match and experiment with writing styles and visual communication (e.g. documentary, epistolary and diary styles, prose and verse, creative non-fiction, multi-modal writing, comic strips). Other conceivable formats include blogs, exhibitions, performances (e.g. theatre, music), podcasts, digital and new media, and even apps and platforms about travel which are changing how it is communicated (see Douglas and Barnwell 2019). Innovation in communication and publishing might open up debate as to what counts as a travelogue, but creativity and playfulness in this endeavour are likely to reach wider audiences and make unique contributions to knowledge creation.

Smoking and the city: an example of a travelogue

The travelogue methodology will now be illustrated with a study in southwest China (Davey and Zhao 2021). The study analysed tobacco-related symbolism in Yuxi city, and the implications for residents living within the vicinity of the tobacco industry, to fill gaps in the literature about smoking and place and smoking prevalence in cities with tobacco factories.

The study included a literature review (to identify knowledge gaps, and develop research questions), itinerary planning, narration of journeying around the city, data collection and analysis, and reflexivity. The travelogue was written up sequentially and chronologically in an episodic and narrative style, beginning with a bus journey and arrival in the city (the article’s introduction), which revealed linkages between the tobacco industry, landscape, urban design, and cultural heritage. The choice of route and itinerary and participants were based on the information they brought to answering the research questions. The data included observations, interviews, visual data (e.g. photos), material data (e.g. museum exhibits), and sensorial data about sights and smells in the city such as vivid first impressions upon arrival and a strong tobacco smell in the air from the tobacco industry.

The return journey home (the ‘discussion’ section of the article) was an opportunity for drawing conclusions from the findings which extended previous research, and engaging in reflection. For example, the residents’ pride of the tobacco industry, interpretation of smoking as beneficial, and identity work around cigarettes for social benefits, prompted questions by the researchers about the appropriateness of the travelogue’s tobacco control agenda.

The travelogue methodology facilitated an understanding of tobacco consumption and production from varying perspectives: people’s mental representations (tobacco and the tobacco industry were prominent in sense of self and city), smoking norms and practices, tangible forms of the cityscape (e.g. tobacco-related symbolism in architecture, toponymic terminology, tourist sites), and context and social processes (e.g. culture, economics, and political ideology). Smokers even internalised these various dimensions within selfhood, social identities, placemaking, and smoking practices, contributing to the production of ‘the city of tobacco’ (Yuxi city’s nickname). Indeed, the novel findings led to a different and more complex and holistic understanding than previously reported, leading to a new theorization of tobacco use with practical implications, coined by the authors as ‘rhizomatic smoking’ and ‘rhizomatic tobacco control’ respectively. The published study (Davey and Zhao 2021) is also a good example of interweaving and balancing diverse writing styles into a coherent storyline, such as objective descriptions alongside more subjective and narrational accounts, as well as a more creative layout of an academic article.

Next steps: an invitation to travel

The travelogue is an innovative methodology for knowledge creation about urban health and health equity and other topics. It can also be picked up in other areas of health and social science and further afield. The methodology is flexible, inclusive, and open, and this editorial is not meant to be the final word on the topic. I have simply laid its foundations.

Only the initial step(s) of the methodology (e.g. planning the journey and travel) needs to be followed if the aim is exploration, fact-finding, or pilot work. Therefore, while I make a distinction between original research with empirical data and methods (the ‘travelogue methodology’), and a simple travel report which is more anecdotal, casual, and speculative, such as a site visit or field trip report (e.g. Gill 2019, Selamet 2022, Davey 2022), they are both informative and useful. Cities & Health welcomes travelogue submissions in these different formats; see the ‘Instructions for authors’ for information. It is advisable to outline which steps you have included in your study along with justifications and also suggestions for taking it further in empirical research or in practice.

You are encouraged to make a start on your own travelogue. Commentary is also invited on travel and healthy cities in the 21^st century: What is it about travel that creates knowledge about cities, health, and ourselves? Which kinds of ‘travel research methods’ can contribute to achieving urban health and health equity? How might health and travel develop as a new focus or subdiscipline? In an era in which we are all on the move in an increasingly globalised and mobile world, answering these questions and engaging in the travelogue methodology seems more important than ever before.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gareth Davey

Gareth Davey is a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Professional Studies at the University of Bolton. He has designed, coordinated, and delivered courses on research methods and qualitative research methods at undergraduate and postgraduate levels at various universities.