Researchers are, in many ways, travellers and storytellers whose journeys across landscapes, disciplines, and cultures offer profound opportunities for discovery, reflection, and connection within contemporary cultural studies.

Drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives including literary studies, media studies, and cultural geography, this collection demonstrates how travel becomes a site of learning when approached with openness, transforming research into a dialogic process between self and other, between here and elsewhere. The contributions explore how storytelling bridges worlds, translating experience into meaning and making scholarship not only analytical but affective and human. From literary tourism in South Africa to digital storytelling in Antarctica, from festival cultures in Vanuatu to heritage tourism at the Great Wall, these researcher-travellers craft narratives that reveal the material and symbolic processes of meaning-making in spaces of encounter.

This volume will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in cultural studies, media studies, tourism studies, literary studies, and cultural geography, as well as scholars working in participatory research methodologies and narrative inquiry. The collection also serves as a valuable resource for postgraduate courses exploring research methodologies, cultural tourism, and the intersection of travel and academic practice. This articles in this book were originally published in various issues of Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies.