The (bio)politics of tourism

In a series of articles that will be published throughout November and December 2023, I explore how science in relation to the COVID-19 health crisis is selectively used to advance certain (bio)political agendas, and how these political agendas resulted in certain (in)actions in the realm of tourism.

A co-authored Commentary titled ‘Denialist and Neoliberal Approaches to Tourism and the COVID-19 Pandemic’ is the result of a collaboration with Rita de Cássia Ariza da Cruz at Universidade de São Paulo. The Commentary has been published in Tourism Geographies (please contact me if you cannot access it). In this commentary we draw attention to the politicization of science in respect to the health crisis. We argue that articulations of tourism’s future have not sufficiently scrutinised the potentially adverse and deadly consequences of national politics and policies. To illustrate this point, we briefly discuss how the cases of Brazil and the Netherlands might contribute to a better understanding of the political and geopolitical dimensions of the pandemic as it relates to tourism.

 

Together with co-authors Benjamin Lucca Iaquinto and Joseph Cheer we have published a Symposium in Environment and Planning C titled “Coercive geographies: Biopower, spatial politics, and the tourist” . This symposium examines the relations between biopower, destination governance and tourism. Biopower, a Foucauldian concept, refers to political strategies based on humanity’s biological features. In the simplest of terms, it is applied via biopolitical mandates that govern life of a given population. Contemporary tourism exemplifies the exertion of biopower over the mobility of travellers, as was evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to a lesser degree, continues to do so. The role that tourism plays in enabling authorities to enact spatial transformations reinforcing state power, while also indicating potential means of resistance, is foregrounded in this symposium. The four empirical contributions extend biopolitical thought by demonstrating that biopower is instrumental in the practices and regimes of mobility, security, in/exclusion of tourism. In Europe, the Dutch government experimented with enclosed “COVID-safe” tourist spaces. In Macao, China’s border regime screened tourists based on their viral threat capacities. On Naoshima Island in Japan, museums have transformed into infrastructures of bodily control. In Taiwan, flight attendants are grappling with newly emerging forms of biopower shaping the sociality of air travel and their own practices of hospitality. These empirically informed contributions interrogate how tourism figures in attempts to govern bodies at the population level, while uncovering the modes of coercion applied to govern tourists and the spaces they inhabit.

Claudio Minca and I contributed to this Symposium by examining the so-called “pilot holidays”, a set of experiments that aimed to gather knowledge about “future tourism” and carried out during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands. We analyse the biopolitical, if not thanapolitical, dimensions of these experiments and how they are possibly linked to the broader strategies adopted to confront COVID-19. Moreover, we advance the question of “who gets to live and who gets to die” within the context of the pandemic. The first page of the article titled ‘Post-COVID biopolitical fantasies and the case of the Dutch “Pilot Holidays”’can be found below (accepted version of the article).

Other contributions to the Symposium: