2025 SOAN Summer Enrichment Fund Recipient: Tully Jones-Wilkins

The SOAN Enrichment Fund supported my research project on adventure tourism in Ecuador, where I conducted a short yet intensive ethnographic study. My project aimed to investigate how adventure tourism media—brochures, social media—shape travelers’ expectations and how those intersect with the lived realities of host communities and tourists. My driving question was place-based: how do the relationships between tourists, local guides, and the places they tour shape new or existing ways of understanding and imagining these locations?

With this question, and the financial support of the fund, I set out on a two-week tourism experience in Ecuador. Hostel-hopping, I followed four pairs of international tourists across the country and conducted informal interviews with guides, these travelers, and local tourism operation owners. Together, we moved from the lowland jungles to the cordilleras of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi mountains. Naturally, my project shifted as I went through the process: “place” became increasingly complicated to investigate given my position as a tourist and my inability to fully understand it from a local point of view. Conducting this project taught me a great deal.

I grappled with academic questions I explore in my thesis, but perhaps more importantly, I learned the value of creating and carrying out an independent project. I developed practical skills, from honing grant applications to the practice of interviewing strangers, asking uncomfortable questions, and navigating uncertainties. I spent time in unfamiliar environments, trudged through torrential downpours, and even questioned whether I should be doing this research at all.

Over the five months I was immersed in this work, I often recalled something a friend of mine, Liam Murphy, said as we walked the cobbled streets of Cuenca: ethnography is “just like… living life”—with the extra challenge of writing something about it. Student projects don’t always yield neat or definitive findings, but to me this project was less about extracting some latent knowledge and more about practicing a way of living— practicing a posture of curiosity.

In the end, this project clarified for me the value of an education that celebrates and supports independent work. Not necessarily to produce tidy answers, but to sit with questions and learn from the process itself. Concretely, I learned how to adapt a research plan in the field: how to shift methods, revise questions, and embrace the unexpected when realities didn’t align with my assumptions. I also learned how to approach strangers and build trust quickly, which is not only a research skill but a life skill I will carry forward.

This opportunity has supported me in ways that extend beyond a single project. Academically, it gave me space to test and deepen my methodological skills. Professionally, it pushed me to work independently, problem-solve, and engage with people across linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Personally, it gave me confidence in my ability to step into uncertainty and embrace it. I come away not just with material for my thesis, but with a stronger sense of how I want to approach scholarship and life: with openness, humility, and readiness to continuously learn in the worlds I encounter.