Beyond multicultural ‘tolerance’: guided tours and guidebooks as transformative tools for civic learning

Abstract

In bringing people together that otherwise might have little more than passing contact with one another, tourism is appreciated for its potential to transform mindsets by fostering multi-perspectivity, a cornerstone of global citizenship education, among both ‘tourists’ and ‘locals’. Hence, while tourism plays a significant role in marginalising and exploiting immigrants’ bodies, labour and heritages, it also holds significant potential as a critical pedagogical tool for transcending the limits of multicultural tolerance discourse and combatting exploitation and xenophobia. In this article, we reflect on two Europe-based global citizenship-inspired initiatives bringing together migration and tourism in novel ways: Migrantour guided walking tours and the Roots Guide guidebook. They endeavour to rework guided tours and guidebooks, two of tourism’s most common pedagogical tools, into ‘good company’ that supports the Arendtian practice of ‘visiting’ as a key mode of civic learning. In so doing, we explore the representational and structural opportunities and challenges that these two initiatives encounter as they seek to co-create multi-dimensional narratives and routes in ways that recognise guides’ diverse experiences and perceptions of the places they call home, avoid stereotypical representations of ‘communities’ and hold space for the real-life frictions that accompany diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Global citizenship education
• multi-perspectivity
• Hannah Arendt
• public pedagogy
• migration
• transformative learning

Acknowledgements

We would like to sincerely thank our article’s three anonymous reviewers, Ingeborg Mehus and Chih-Chen Trista Lin for very helpful comments that have strengthened the article’s message and honed its contribution to the field.

Disclosure statement

Meghann Ormond has been, since 2018, the curator/editor and scientific coordinator of Roots Guide, a project legally owned by the non-profit organisation Stichting Pocket Stories, registered at the Kamer van Koophandel in the Netherlands under registration number 66886090 with ANBI status from 21/06/2017. Her position is unpaid and voluntary. Francesco Vietti was the scientific coordinator for the Migrantour project from 2009-19. He continues to collaborate with the social tourism cooperative Viaggi Solidali (cooperative registration number: A161747 of 05/01/2005), a Migrantour network partner. The authors do not financially benefit from this research or its publication.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meghann Ormond

Meghann Ormond is Associate Professor in Cultural Geography at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. She is deeply invested in and concerned with how differently mobile people's roots, rights and vulnerabilities are recognised and included in the places they visit and in which they live. The author of 40 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters and books on transnational mobility, health and care issues, she is Deputy Editor for Globalization and Health, an editorial board member for Current Issues in Tourism and a trustee for the Expatriate Archive Centre.

Francesco Vietti

Francesco Vietti is an anthropologist with a research interest in the intersection of migration, tourism and heritage. He is Postdoctoral Fellow Researcher at the University of Milan Bicocca in Italy. The scientific coordinator of the ‘Mobility and Heritage in the Mediterranean’ summer school, he has carried out fieldwork in Eastern Europe (Moldova), the Balkans (Albania and Kosovo) and the Mediterranean (Lampedusa). He is an executive board member for the Italian Society for Applied Anthropology (SIAA).