This research critically examines tourism’s role in environmental and cultural ruination, challenging the passive "apocalyptic gaze" promoted by phenomena like “last chance tourism.” Rather than viewing devastated landscapes as lost causes or spectacle, the project adopts a relational and regenerative approach, grounded in Indigenous, posthumanist, and critical thought.
Accordingly, the objectives of this research are to:
- To enhance understanding of how tourism facilitates, and is adapted within, states of ruination;
- To identify diverse Indigenous and local community practices that can foster regenerative and resurgent connections within tourism contexts;
- To advance and activate theoretical and methodological approaches that can support regenerative and resurgent human-environment relationships;
- To translate research into resources that can help resist ruination and foster regenerative and resurgent tourism imaginaries.
Using a methodology of geo-kinshipping and a variety of case studies across Turtle Island, the project explores how tourism contributes to and adapts within states of ruination, while foregrounding Indigenous and local community practices that foster ecological and cultural resurgence. Aimed at reshaping human-environment relationships, the project will produce scholarly outputs, community resources, educational materials, and public-facing tools such as audio tours and an alternative guidebook. Through this, it seeks to transform tourism from a vector of extraction into a practice of care, regeneration, and resistance.
This research is supported by the SSHRC Insight Grants 2025-2030.