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gradually expanded and become more complex and varied. For example,
and as we illustrated above:
Emerging mobile technologies are changing the nature of vision for both
tourists and tourism researchers (Feighey 2003, p. 82).
If there now was an earlier tendency in tourism studies to approach
images as predominantly visual, then this has been challenged by various
other theoretical understandings and developments. A recent example is
performative notions of tourists and tourism. In addition to paying
attention to how tourism is done, through practises and active
engagements, those with a performative approach emphasize the
importance of other senses along with the visual for tourist experience and
behaviour (Bærenholdt, Haldrup, Larsen, and Urry 2004, Crouch 2003,
Edensor, 2001). If image-mediated tourist encounters and experiences in
practice are embodied and involve all the senses, then there is clearly more
to images in tourism than their pure visuality.
This further suggests that images need to be placed, understood, and
investigated in a broader context. For that purpose we have chosen the
umbrella term “tourist and tourism imaginationings”. By this we want to
refer to a terrain that covers all kinds of production and consumption of
tourism, through the medium of images and imaginationings, by tourists as
well as actors and stakeholders in the industry. It also embraces
imaginationings of tourists and tourism produced by researchers and
scholars in tourism studies, ourselves included.
In this perspective, tourism can be said to live a life in-between
meaning and matter, for example, in-between all kinds of concrete things
which people attach with touristic meanings. What we refer to as “tourist
and tourism imaginationings” is then about ways of bringing meaning and
matter together for particular tourism and tourist purposes. In other words,
imaginationings here involve processes of signification that translate the
physical matters of travelling, locations, and whatever material resources
that humans meet as bodies with senses, into various touristic meanings
and values. This process of translating and transforming is necessary in
order for goods, services and sights on the Earth to be appropriated for
tourism purposes and become tourism commodities.
Enlarging the context of images in tourism studies means that one
needs to consider also other modalities that are part of the constitution of
tourism and tourist imaginationings, for example “globalization”,
“capitalism”, “neo-liberalism”, and environmental concerns and public
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