The Cosmopolitan Hope of Tourism: Critical Action and Worldmaking Vistas

Abstract

This paper examines the role and practice of cosmopolitan action -that is as a mediating vision which closely parallels the active discourse of worldmaking. Tourism is an industry built on distinctions between strangers and friends, with inherent potentials for both oppression and empowerment. Critical cosmopolitan theory offers ideas that give us

Worldmaking Agency–Worldmaking Authority: The Sovereign Constitutive Role of Tourism

“…Like Tucker (2009), the fourth contributor to intelligence on and about worldmaking authority and influence, Swain (2009), is much exercised by what is going across the globe today in the naturalization (or normalization) of place and identity. In her feminist and ethically engaged survey of the supposed worldmaking dynamics of change in and through tourism, Swain finds much to applaud in Hollinshead's call for improved and prospective thought on the performative and transformative power of tourism, though she seems unsure herself whether worldmaking should stand as a discrete construction itself or otherwise serve as an arm or area of critical cosmopolitan theory.…”

Why Risk Why Now? Conceptual Problems Around the Risk Perception in Tourism Industry

“…Afterwards the attacks to the towers in New York in 2001, the concept of risk started to be applied to travels and tourism issues. From that day onwards, a wide range of studies focused on risk perception as a scientific criterion in order for bringing security to tourists who were more vulnerable to threats than others (ROEHL and FESENMEIER, 1992;KELLY, 1997;HALL, 2002;HALL, TIMOTHY and DUVAL, 2003;FLOYD, GIBSON, PENNINGTON-GRAY and THAPA, 2003;QUI-ZHANG, 2005;QI, GIBSON andZHANG, 2009 FLOYD andPENNINGTON-GRAY, 2004;HEGGIE and HEGGIE, 2004;KUTO and GROVES, 2004;REISINGER and MAVONDO, 2005;GOLDBLATT and HU, 2005;KOZAK, CROTTS and LAW, 2007;BIANCHI, 2007;KORSTANJE, 2009a;PARASKEVAS and ARENDEL, 2007;TANG and WONG, 2009;GUT AND JARRELL, 2010;SWAIN, 2009;ABDEL-AZIM, 2010;TRAN and PHILLIP, 2010). KORSTANJE, Maximiliano Emanuel.…”

Cosmopolitan empathy in volunteer tourism: a psychosocial perspective

“…'Critical' cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, has emerged as a feminist critique of the dominant discourse of cosmopolitanism, criticising it for presenting a masculinist version of individualised subjectivity and abstract, disembedded systems of ethics and rights (cf. Anderson, 2001;Brassett & Bulley, 2007;Calhoun, 2002;Cheah & Robbins, 1998;Delanty, 2006;Derrida, 2001;Erskine, 2002;Linklater, 2007;Lisle, 2009;McRobbie, 2006;Mendieta, 2009;Mitchell, 2007;Molz, 2005;Robinson, 1999;Swain, 2009;Vertovec & Cohen, 2002). What arises from this second vision of cosmopolitanism is an awareness of the importance of relationality, intersubjectivity, and what Judith Butler sees as an endless undertaking of subjects being '(re)constituted through dialectical processes of recognition, within multiple networks of power' (Mitchell, 2007, p. 711).…”

“…As such, cosmopolitanism as a normative concept proposes that citizens freed from the divisive confines of national citizenship will be unified by their common humanity, leading to a global society in which cultural diversity is embraced and geographically distant others are treated as neighbours (Carter, 2004;Lyons et al, 2012). A cosmopolitan disposition is commonly associated with qualities such as openness to cultural difference, semiotic proficiency in reading other cultures, lack of geographical rootedness, and tastes or attitudes that reflect globalised consumption patterns (Appiah, 2010;Beck, 2006;Hannerz, 2004;Skrbis et al, 2004;Swain, 2009;Vertovec & Cohen, 2002). Cosmopolitanism can therefore refer equally to identity, mobility, citizenship, consumption, responsibility and ethics.…”

“…Volunteer tourism is framed as a practice that transforms imaginings about the suffering of distant others into proximate acts of help and care. As such, volunteer tourism has come to be investigated for its potential to foster cosmopolitan empathy (Beck, 2006;Swain, 2009), new geographies of responsibility, care and compassion (Massey, 2004;Mitchell, 2007;Mostafanezhad, 2013a;Popke, 2006Popke, , 2007Sin, 2010) and the development of ethical subjectivity or global citizenship (Baillie Smith & Laurie, 2011;Butcher & Smith, 2015;Crossley, 2014;Diprose, 2012;Heron, 2011;Lyons, Hanley, Wearing, & Neil, 2012;McGehee & Santos, 2005;Tiessen & Epprecht, 2012).…”