Immigration, Identity, and Tourism: A Critical Analysis of Experiences in Domestic Tourism of East and Horn of Africa Immigrants in New Zealand

Growing global attention to concepts such as inclusive tourism continue to challenge long-standing assumptions within tourism scholarship. Research praxis is increasingly being shaped by diverse ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspectives as previously marginalised regions and knowledge systems gain legitimacy in academic and policy discourses. Contemporary debates, including those concerning indigenous methodologies, culturally appropriate research designs, and regenerative or transformative tourism, are marked by ongoing contestation and uneven power dynamics. These tensions reveal competing efforts to maintain the status quo, advocate for change, or negotiate ambivalence toward emerging research agendas.

Positioned within this evolving scholarly landscape, the present study investigates how immigration, culture, and identity mediate participation in domestic tourism. Specifically, the research explores the domestic tourism experiences of immigrants from the East and Horn of Africa living in New Zealand, contributing to a culturally nuanced understanding of how immigrant communities engage with local tourism spaces and practices. Guided by a critical realist ontology and a relativist epistemological stance, the study employs a retroductive qualitative research design to identify mechanisms that generate the observed phenomena. The study utilises culturally appropriate data collection methods, namely baraza and conversational oral storytelling. A total of four mabaraza were conducted with 30 participants, comprising 28 adults and two young adults (aged 21 and 22 years). An additional baraza was held with five children aged 6-11 years. Furthermore, 10 family-based conversational storytelling sessions were conducted separately, involving 19 adults, six children aged 5-11 years, and one teenage participant. These diverse participant groups provided robust coverage across age, gender, social status, and family contexts, ensuring the capture of dense, multifaceted data and a wide range of perspectives. The methods support an in-depth explanation of participants’ lived experiences while respecting cultural protocols and modes of knowledge-sharing.

Critical realist thematic analysis was used to interpret the data, enabling a move beyond empirical accounts to identify deeper structural and generative mechanisms shaping participants' experiences. The analysis employed retroduction to identify eleven generative mechanisms underlying East and Horn of Africa immigrants’ domestic tourism participation in New Zealand. Organised across four key themes, the findings reveal how structural constraints, legal conditions, cultural sense-making, identity negotiations, and family-centred decision logics interact to shape tourism experiences and participation patterns. The study found that domestic tourism functions not only as a leisure practice but also as a settlement mechanism through which immigrants negotiate belonging, identity, and integration. Participation is shaped by the interplay of structural, cultural, interpersonal, and family factors, including affordability, mobility, information access, cultural responsiveness, and experiences of inclusion or discrimination. Domestic tourism provides opportunities to negotiate identity, strengthen family and community ties, and develop place attachment, and build familiarity in their adopted homeland. While inclusive and culturally responsive experiences foster engagement and social integration, perceived discrimination, information barriers, and culturally misaligned tourism products constrain participation. Overall, the findings position domestic tourism as an important mechanism through which immigrants negotiate belonging, wellbeing, and integration in host society, while offering deeper causal explanation of immigrant tourism behaviour beyond descriptive accounts of participation.

The study proposes a new integrative framework for understanding the experiences of African immigrant communities in domestic tourism in New Zealand. The framework provides theoretical and practical insights that may inform future tourism policy, destination management, and culturally responsive approaches to tourism research.