Travel Broadens the Mind or Making the Strange Familiar The Story of a Visiting Academic.

This article tells an autoethnographic story of the ways in which a specific tourist experience-visiting a "girlie" bar in Bangkok-led me to reflect afresh on themes, issues, and concerns that have always been central to my work as a researcher and academic, namely, storying lives, autobiography and/or biography, identities and careers, giving voice, Othering, representation, social justice, and making the familiar strange. Most of all, however, the experience strengthened my commitment to the need to recognize the way in which the strange is familiar and to "acknowledge how much `out there' is like, `in here" (Neumann, 1996, p. 182). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]