A politics of affirming nonhumans in tourism world-making: Posthuman conceptual considerations
Mon statut pour la session
In this presentation, we examine the world-making possibilities of posthuman affirmative ethics for more-than-human tourism research. Specifically, we consider the politics mobilized by concepts like sentience and agency in posthuman tourism research, and the relative capacities of each to facilitate an affirming openness towards entangled more-than-human tourism relations. Contextualized by the urgency of planetary change and environmental crises impacting on, and being impacted by, tourism, as well as the increased demand for park/protected area access leading up to and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic (Ontario Parks, 2023), we show how nature-based tourism is entangled with material-affective doings of humans and living and nonliving nonhumans in the Anthropocene. We highlight some of the generative possibilities of agency as a concept that is both sensitive to, and open to, all nonhumans in the making of nature-based tourism worlds. Informed by posthuman onto-epistemological and relational commitments, and tourism literatures, we suggest a renewed attention to agencies – including nonhuman agencies that refuse human-resemblance or agencies co-constructed in relational-entanglement – as an affirming conceptual frame for more just, equitable, and inclusive tourism futures with all nonhumans.