Tourist encounters

This article seeks to contribute to the understanding of the tourist through a combined focus on what the tourist does and how the tourist makes sense of what she or he does as an active individual as tourist in contemporary culture and society. The article focuses these concerns through dimensions of space as a means of understanding the way the tourist constructs significance in places, destinations and sites. To this end, two components that we discuss are the tradition of Swedish time/space geography and the recent, especially British, ‘turn’ in geography towards the agentive, embodied role of the tourist. We argue that, together, these approaches enable a more nuanced interpretation of the complex ways in which the tourist encounters space/place and a means through which tourism is constructed by the tourist. Connections and disconnections in contemporary society are related to the tourist encounter and assist the rethinking of touristic constitutions of place/space as less detached from other content and significance of contemporary life than is generally understood.