Book: Tourism and Biopolitics in Pandemic Times

Tourism and Biopolitics in Pandemic Times

“Tourism and Biopolitics in Pandemic Times” was 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.

It is out now for order and preview in the following link: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-46399-0

An overview of the book and links to the individual chapters:

Exploring Biopolitical Tourism Spatialities in Pandemic Times

authors: Claudio Minca & Maartje Roelofsen

Abstract

This introduction chapter briefly 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. The chapter concludes with an outline of the structure of the book.

“A Healthy Person is a Happy Person”. Biopolitical Reflections on the Promotion of Favignana as a COVID-free Island

authors: Caterina Ciarleglio & Claudio Minca

Abstract

This chapter discusses the experiment of ‘COVID-free’ island, promoted as an enclavic immunised space by the Italian government during the pandemic. The idea of an experimental tourist community placed in an enclavic space located on an island draws from a long tradition of tourist ‘laboratories’ in which tourist bodies may be closely governed and monitored. In a time in which ‘COVID-free’ spaces and travel corridors have become a new putative horizon to be explored by the relevant industry, some islands have been advertised as potentially shielded from contamination and available for close and continuous monitoring of individual and collective behavior of ‘the guests’ and their movements. As the analysis of the island of Favignana developed in this chapter demonstrates, the attempt to promote this destination as an immunized COVID-free space has resulted in the arrival of an almost unmonitored mass of tourists in the summer 2021, in a relatively poor respect of the protective measures and in the exposure of the tourist workers to the frequent possibility of been contaminated.

Between Threat and Privilege: Narratives of Tourism in Crisis

authors: Myra Coulter & Dominic Lapointe

Abstract

In this chapter we delve into 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. Specifically, we examine 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. We draw upon the discourses and experiences of a range of stakeholders, or para-informants, in the tourism value chain, as represented in online news media accounts. Through a hybrid discourse and narrative analysis of digital news articles, our chapter highlights the biopolitical dimensions of tourism that became exposed through the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the tourist subject, and states and spaces of exception at multiple scales. Our analysis of the pandemic’s becoming phase in early 2020 points up multiple – social, spatial, and political – emergent tendencies in the global tourism system.

Re-habituation and the More-than-human Biopolitics of Gorilla Tourism in Uganda

authors: Amos Ochieng, Christine Ampumuza & Maartje Roelofsen

Abstract

‘Habituation’ is often described within conservation and tourism studies as a relational process by which animals and humans become accustomed to one another’s bodily presence. This chapter offers a biopolitical reading of habituation within the context of gorilla tourism in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda during the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing ethnographic methods and desk-based research, we examine the implementation of new biosecurity controls and interventions for both humans and animals throughout 2020–2023, drawing on more-than-human biopolitical theory and relational approaches to animal agency in tourism. The findings show that the pandemic has exacerbated existing inequities that had historically been sustained by conservation biopolitics, affecting both human and non-human species. The chapter also raises questions about the ongoing efforts to (re)habituate gorillas, and not merely within the context of crisis. Given the ephemeral nature of tourism visits, what do tourists contribute to sustaining the human-animal relations for the benefit of both human and non-human species?

Affirmative Alternatives to the Biopolitics of Air Travel: Actions by the Taoyuan Flight Attendant Union During the COVID-19 Pandemic

author: Chih-Chen Trista Lin

Abstract

The field of tourism offers a key to understanding past, present, and future biopolitical action implicated in the resistance against forms of biopower. Yet, the potential for tourism geographies to engage with and inform debates on biopolitics remains to be realized. To reflect that potential, this chapter 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. I analyse the three dimensions of the union’s campaigns at the exceptional time of the pandemic as “affirmative alternatives” to the biopolitical production of, and control over, air travel, health, and labour. The analytics proposed in the chapter open a space for understanding the “nitty-gritty” of workers’ struggles to live well, to be governed better, and to establish a qualitatively different living-with vis-à-vis the general public. My discussion of TFAU’s experiences 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.

Afterthoughts

authors: Claudio Minca & Maartje Roelofsen

Abstract

In this concluding chapter the main findings of the book are summarized. The chapter also provides suggestions for potential directions that the biopolitical in tourism may take in the near future.