Transmodern critical tourism studies: a call for hope and transformation

Abstract

In this paper I engage with a broad range of literature that provides evidence of an emerging and significant paradigm shift in human evolution as we face an increasingly distressed and unsustainable world that screams for some hope and transformation. To describe this shift, different authors use a variety of terms, such as transmodernity paradigm (Ghisi); transmodern philosophy of political liberation (Dussel); Hegelian dialectical triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis (Magda); reflective/living-systems paradigm (Elgin); partnership model of caring economics (Eisler); relational global consciousness and biosphere politics (Rifkin). Reviewing a broad range of these perspectives, I will argue that tourism is actually one of the key indicators that manifest the global shift in human consciousness. In consequence, an engagement with transmodern critical tourism studies and hopeful tourism scholarship gives us an enormous political weight to point to the agency and authority of tourism to possibly change the world for the better and assist it in its longings for more caring global economy and society. In doing so, we can finally penetrate public discourses and change their dominant interpretations of tourism as being nothing more than a frivolous leisure activity or yet another form of economic development