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 hope for the progressive potential of tourism to transform differences into equity. In popular discourse cosmopolitanism refers to elites, travel, world peace, multicultural education and humanitarianism, in opposition to nationalism, warfare and ethnic hatred. Theorists' analyse cosmopolitanism as mobility, identity, a consciousness or worldview, a global process or as a monolithic cultural companion to global capitalism. Some scholars argue that tourism and tourists have ineffective links to cosmopolitanism, while others see that tourism encompasses cosmopolitan making or worldmaking processes in terms of traveling people and traveling ideas.This article expands my work on how cosmopolitanisms are actually experienced, embodied, situated, performed and imagined in tourism by consumers and the toured. I also engage questions about our own embodied cosmopolitanisms as tourism researchers, and how this may affect our work within and outside of the academy. My project addresses some basic human questions through feminist analysis about peoples' abilities to understand each other and create equitable lives. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.