Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic proved the tourism industry to be a house of cards, and yet it has returned with a vengeance. Concealed in each argument between tourism’s sustainable visions and degrowth dialogues is the refusal to question the industry’s unconsidered origins, consequences, and existence. The critiques of tourism, brought together prove there is no sustainable path forward for the industry, locally or globally. Surely, a better world is possible, but without a collective imagination that roots itself in post-capitalist, post-industrialist possibilities, the interculturality and responsibility so often sought after is dead on arrival. Our solutions and the epistemologies that breed them are deeply impoverished by a lack of imagination. Ideology holds the possibility for new worlds hostage. Our work is not simply to debate the equity and equanimity of the matter, but to discover how our own ideologies are imaginaries that subvert imagination. If, at its core, the world’s biggest industry is unsustainable, then arguing for sustainability or degrowth is, fundamentally, no more sustainable. For social movements to succeed in the face of overtourism invasions and cultural extractivism, our modus operandi must proceed first and foremost from the poverty that sprung them. Then and only then can we begin to conjure ways of being and belonging together, ways of hosting the other deeply informed by what it means to be a guest in our own homes and neighbourhoods.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—Tourism, Leisure and Change: Transforming People and Places
KEYWORDS
SUSTAINABILITY, DEGROWTH, LIMITS, DIALOGUE, INTERCULTURALITY, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
