Patricia STOKOWSKI, University of Vermont, United States
Monika DERRIEN, University of Vermont, United States
Walter KUENTZEL, University of Vermont, United States
Yumiko JAKOBCIC, University of Vermont, United States
The idea of imaginaries refers to socially constructed, taken-for-granted meanings about events, places, and people that help individuals make sense of personal and shared experiences (Gaonkar, 2002; Salazar & Graburn, 2014; Watkins, 2015). Imaginaries are created visually and linguistically from common symbols, language, and understandings, and are presented publicly as rhetorical claims. Research suggests that imaginaries can be seen as intangible resources used by different groups for diverse purposes during community tourism transitions (Stokowski et al., 2021). In this presentation, we draw from a study of rural tourism development in the state of Vermont, USA, to examine conceptual patterns in how tourism and community imaginaries are evoked and challenged by various community groups during tourism development processes. The data show that even though community members emphasized different kinds of imaginaries (discourses of growth, of local history, of utopia), they seemed to believe and trust that they and other local people were “speaking the same language” relative to tourism planning, resiliency, and sustainability. Counterintuitively, this may be partly because two major local institutions promoted unrealistic imaginaries related to the social and ecological systems of tourism planning and sustainability – discourses that were easy to dismiss. Our conceptual analysis shows that the language of tourism development is equally as important as its physical manifestations. Further, landscape and heritage imaginaries are particularly relevant for tourism planning, but they are continually re-imagined during development processes (Moore, 2019), and manipulated by local growth coalitions. Nevertheless, the inability of some rural communities to devise interlinked imaginaries of people and place that support collective visions of a shared future may potentially serve as an asset that moderates local tourism development.
Mots clés : Destination planning|Discourse|Imaginaries|Rural communities|Tourism
A104088PS