Special issue: Building our stories : Co-creating tourism futures in tourism research, education and practice

• Storytelling is a powerful way of exploring the past, crafting values in the present, and imagining the future. Stories, told from different perspectives and drawing from diverse experiences, can build shared understandings, empathy and care. Everyday stories of tourism - coping, success, empowerment, nurturing, disruption, relationship building and activism - are important tools that help students, teachers, researchers, practitioners and community members reflect and learn. The stories that we tell join the streams of wider narratives, shaping our understanding of the world and the ways in which we encounter it, thus providing a worldmaking function. Engaging in storytelling is anything but a benign activity as different narratives are continuously constituting and naturalizing the world and our relations with others. Tourism scholar Keith Hollinshead (2004) describes worldmaking as collaborative processes that essentialize and normalize peoples, places and practices. Hence, the notion of worldmaking calls for critical reflection on the ways in which stories enact, reinforce and alter power relationships by erasing alternative stories and by giving to voices in the margins. For us as tourism educators, storytelling unlock doors, opens new spaces for multiple ways of knowing and being, and moves towards more sustainable, hopeful, caring and ethical worldmaking in tourism.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

tourism

storytelling

education

co-creation

Turismvetenskap

Tourism

Pedagogics and Educational Sciences

Pedagogik och Utbildningsvetenskap

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

art (subject category)