Representing Futures in Tourism

Hollinshead’s (2009) notion of worldmaking in tourism is useful in its drawing attention to the ways in which ‘particular dominant / favoured representations of people/place/pasts’ are privileged and projected in tourism. In this paper I seek to extend Hollinshead’s (2009) ideas on worldmaking in order to consider how tourism also represents futures. The futures which tourism represents may include utopian futures or alternatively apocalyptic futures, and thereby produce particular orientations towards the future. The ways in which certain futures are selectively privileged in tourism, therefore, are a particularly potent aspect of the power of representation in tourism. This paper will discuss the potential implications of different future-representations in tourism, and hence why this aspect of tourism’s worldmaking power is important to consider.