« Settler colonial accomulation is primitive: Paul J. Guernsey, ‘Reframing So-Called Primitive Accumulation for Settler Colonial Contexts: Ancestral Enclosures and Spatial Conceptions of History’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2023
Totally decolonial: John Grant, Corey Snelgrove, ‘Returning to totality: Settler colonialism, decolonization, and struggles for freedom’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2023 »

Settler worldmaking on tour: Michela J. Stinson, ‘Tourism, worldmaking, and disquieting settler atmospherics’, Tourism Geographies, 2023

16Dec23

Abstract: This article considers how affects animate and uphold tourism and settler colonialism. Engaging a ‘curious’ postdisciplinary research methodology informed by the relational power of listening, I trace the emergence of two interrelated atmospheres in the city of Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, both of which exemplify how settler colonialism is built and maintained as a structure of feeling that supports larger processes of worldmaking via tourism. In detailing these two atmospheres and their effects, I illuminate the mechanisms and practices through which tourism-related atmospheric infrastructures overtly and covertly contribute to worldmaking; exemplify how settlers might learn to destabilize, disrupt, or diffuse such atmospherics in and through tourism as a practice of unsettling; and expand on the literature detailing how we might research affective, embodied, and atmospheric moments of tourism. I take inspiration from related critical, interventionist, and narrative work in tourism and build on it to suggest that unsettling tourism—or tourism worldmaking—must be oriented toward mediating agencies of worldmaking like light and sound.


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