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Framing Multipolar Tourism: Imaginaries, Visualities and Futures

Author(s)
Jolynna Sinanan, Ria-Maria Adams, Philipp Budka
Abstract

This article examines multipolar iconography and how imaginaries of remote, climate-vulnerable places have materialized through improved transport, enhanced accommodation facilities, and increased human labor facilitating tourism. These imaginaries are perpetuated through technologies of visual culture, most commonly, through images taken on smartphones and circulated over social media platforms. We argue that a closer investigation and comparison of three distinct places not only illuminates the relationship between imaginaries and visualities as expressed through visual tourism practices but also demonstrates how these practices and destinations are shaped by specific expectations conveyed through social media. The desire to preserve memories of imagined and then witnessed scenes, coupled with the rapidly increasing impacts of climate change, drives individuals to visually document the present—capturing images of snow-covered glaciers and landscapes, natural phenomena such as the northern lights, winter and mountain icescapes, and endangered species such as polar bears. By examining visual practices within the contexts that produced them, we uncover how place-based imaginaries have informed planning, development, and collaborations. These imaginaries, embedded in visions of a “past future” have materialized through the emergence of infrastructures and continue to play out in contemporary tourism practices. Ethnographic fieldwork that focuses on processes of technologization and infrastructural development can reveal the consequences of planning, and includes the potential for co-envisioning socially transformative possibilities by actively engaging the people we work with.

Organisation(s)
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
External organisation(s)
University of Manchester
Journal
Visual Anthropology
ISSN
0894-9468
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2025.2510817
Publication date
06-2025
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
504017 Cultural anthropology
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Cultural Studies, Anthropology
Sustainable Development Goals
SDG 15 - Life on Land
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/18813bd6-7a0d-445c-9613-925090ab6a52