Introduction

The present volume's key proposition that popular cultural practices connected to tourism are pivotal to placemaking posits a challenge. If its premise is framed in traditional symbolic interactionist terms, we may miss some important developments in (a) the study of mobility as a virtual process and (b) the tourism/tourist worldmaking as a discursive domain (both in scholarly and lay practices of 'doing' cultural work). Introduced in tourism studies by Keith Hollinshead (2009a), 'worldmaking' focuses on the institutional making of 'faux' worlds of tourism. This style of cultural production remains invisible to the eyes of visitors, but it successfully weaves statist objectives into accessible quotidian styles, which seep slowly into the ways in which things are understood symbolically and materially. This is the making of one facet of public culture, which in the case I am studying here becomes complicit to the presentation of popular cultural products such as disaster films as part of a new mission civilisatrice: to save the planet from human ignorance. Importantly, Hollinshead does not discuss the affective properties involved in worldmaking processes. And yet, such properties maintain vicarious links to the ways designers and tourism scholars assume the role of a pilgrim into the environments and situations on which they work. As 'meta-movements' (that is, cognitive and affective movements; Coleman & Eade, 2004), these pilgrimages to our planet's futures connect to writing styles, positionality and even legitimisation processes in what is argued and to what end. It all boils down to the experiential/cognitive aspects of assuming particular roles in the design of planetary futures – and in this study, it all begins with climate-centred movies that structure how we feel and act as pilgrims. However, the structures of feeling and experiencing that Raymond Williams (1965: 65, 1977: 132) debated in the 1960s have undergone radical changes in our new millennium because of the introduction of digital technologies in our everyday lives.