Really proud and happy to see this collaboration reaching fruition! Now to be found on the bookshelves is “Tourism and Biopolitics in Pandemic Times”, published by Palgrave Macmillan and written together with Christine Ampumuza, Caterina Ciarleglio, Myra Coulter, Dominic Lapointe, Chih-Chen Trista Lin, Claudio Minca and Amos Ochieng.
The book focuses entirely on the biopolitical in/of tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic. It includes a broad geographical range of empirical studies and brings together scholars in different continents. It also challenges conventional understandings of biopolitics by including alternative approaches and discourses. The collection revisits classical biopolitical approaches to tourism, but also contemplates more-than-human biopolitical approaches, and affirmative biopolitical approaches. Our overarching purpose was to show how different biopolitical lenses can contribute to the analysis of different practices and regimes of mobility, security, and in/exclusion of specific individuals, bodies, and populations in the context of tourism.
Many thanks to all the contributing authors, to Rachael Ballard at Palgrave Macmillan, to Clare Patricia O’Sullivan, and to the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya for funding this project.
Chapter synopses:
Chapter 1 “Exploring Biopolitical Tourism Spatialities in Pandemic Times” (Claudio Minca and Maartje Roelofsen) discusses how biopolitics has been variously conceptualized in social theory and how biopolitics relates to tourism. Reflecting on the outbreak and development of the COVID-19 pandemic, the chapter also provides a critical review of the literature on the role of tourism as a key form of governance that impacts contemporary politics of mobility. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46399-0_1
Chapter 2 ““A Healthy Person is a Happy Person”. Biopolitical Reflections on the Promotion of Favignana as a COVID-free Island” (Caterina Ciarleglio and Claudio Minca) examines an experiment with a ‘COVID-free’ island Favignana, which was promoted by the Italian government as an immunised enclavic space at a certain stage of the pandemic. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46399-0_2
Chapter 3 “Between Threat and Privilege: Narratives of Tourism in Crisis” (Myra Coulter and Dominic Lapointe) explores the role of tourist mobilities in the propagation of the coronavirus, and the related undoing of dominant representations of exclusive leisure spaces and privileged mobilities. It examines the collapse of the international travel and tourism industry and the reordering of uneven (im)mobilities in the weeks leading up to March 11, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46399-0_3
Chapter 4 “Re-habituation and the More-than-human Biopolitics of Gorilla Tourism in Uganda” (Amos Ochieng, Christine Ampumuza and Maartje Roelofsen) draws on more-than-human biopolitical theory and relational approaches to animal agency in tourism. It offers a biopolitical reading of habituation within the context of gorilla tourism in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda during the COVID-19 pandemic and examines the implementation of new biosecurity controls and interventions for both humans and animals. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46399-0_4
Chapter 5 “Affirmative Alternatives to the Biopolitics of Air Travel: Actions by the Taoyuan Flight Attendant Union During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (Chih-Chen Trista Lin) examines a situated perspective surrounding tourism labour, namely the response of the Taoyuan Flight Attendant Union (TFAU) to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on workers in the aviation and hospitality sectors in Taiwan. The chapter indicates clear potential and an imperative for tourism and hospitality to nurture a sociality beyond consumerism and sexism, as an integral part of broader biopolitical and democratic struggles against governmental control and corporate capitalism. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46399-0_5
Chapter 6 “Afterthoughts” (Claudio Minca and Maartje Roelofsen) provides suggestions for potential directions that the biopolitical in tourism may take in the near future. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46399-0_6