Post-viral tourism's antagonistic tourist imaginaries. (Special Issue: Tourism in crisis: global threats to sustainable tourism futures.)
Journal of Tourism Futures
; 7(3):377-389, 2021.
Article
in English
| CAB Abstracts | ID: covidwho-1638550
ABSTRACT
Purpose:
This paper aims to examine the antagonistic coexistence of different tourism imaginaries in global post-viral social landscapes. Such antagonisms may be resolved at the expense of the ethics of tourism mobility, if not adjudicated by post-human reflexivity. Currently, unreflexive behaviours involve the refusal to conform to lifesaving "stay-at-home" policies, the tendency to book holidays and the public inspection of death zones. Design/methodology/approach:
Each of the consumption styles explored in this paper to discuss post-COVID-19 tourism recovery corresponds to at least one tourist imaginary, antagonistically placed against social imaginaries of moral betterment, solidarity, scientific advancement, national security and labour equality. A multi-modal collection of audio-visual and textual data, gathered through social media and the digital press, is categorised and analysed via critical discourse analysis.Findings:
Data in the public domain suggest a split between pessimistic and optimistic attitudes that forge different tourism futures. These attitudes inform different imaginaries with different temporal orientations and consumption styles. Social implications COVID-has exposed the limits of the capacity to efficiently address threats to both human and environmental ecosystems. As once popular tourist locales/destinations are turned by COVID-2019s spread into risk zones with morbid biographical records their identities alter and their imaginaries of suffering become anthropocentric. Originality/value Using Castoriadis' differentiation between social and radical imaginaries, Foucault's biopolitical analysis, Sorokin's work on mentalities and Sorel's reflections on violence, the author argue that this paper has entered a new phase in the governance and experience of tourism, which subsumes the idealistic basis of tourist imaginaries as cosmopolitan representational frameworks under the techno-cultural imperatives of risk, individualistic growth through the adventure ("edgework") and heritage preservation. This paper also needs to reconsider the contribution of technology (not technocracy) to sustainable post-COVID-19 scenarios of tourism recovery.
Tourism, and, Travel, [UU700]; Social, Psychology, and, Social, Anthropology, [UU485]; Communication, and, Mass, Media, [UU360]; Conflict, [UU495]; tourism; attitudes; ethics; aggressive, behaviour; consumption; ecosystems; governance; holidays; human, behaviour; labour; policy; public, domain; social, media; tourists; man; Homo; Hominidae; primates; mammals; vertebrates; Chordata; animals; eukaryotes; aggressive, behavior; behavior; vacations; human, behavior; labor
Full text:
Available
Collection:
Databases of international organizations
Database:
CAB Abstracts
Language:
English
Journal:
Journal of Tourism Futures
Year:
2021
Document Type:
Article
Similar
MEDLINE
...
LILACS
LIS