Being there as artist-researcher in creative tourism

This paper advances the critical turn in tourism studies by examining creative tourism through an embodied, reflexive approach informed by Heidegger's notion of “being there in the world.” Using the researcher's body as a tool of inquiry, it shows how identity and intersectionality shape tourism encounters and knowledge production, urging attention to lived complexity and critical engagement. A multi-case study of five UNESCO Creative Cities in Portugal combines critical discourse analysis with a design-based autoethnographic method, User Experience in Real Life. Findings reveal a gap between branding and lived reality, exposing postcolonial entanglements, gender inequalities, tokenization of artists, precarity of creative labor, and tensions between heritage preservation and commercialization, while embodied participation identifies concrete service design gaps.