Critical Grounding
Asynchronous - Online Only
Featured Exploring while Exploiting: Voluntourism and the (Re)production of Coloniality through Digital Exhibitionism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cinthia Romo Alba, Garrett Pekarek
Volunteer tourism (or voluntourism) refers to the practice of traveling to provide aid, often to socio-economically marginalized countries. While many scholars have analyzed the negative consequences of interpersonal voluntourist-host community interactions, few have examined the online consequences of voluntourism. Indeed, despite social media platforms increasingly facilitating the digital exhibition of impoverished and war-torn communities across the world, few scholars have examined the ways in which voluntourists—seeking to provide aid to these communities—engage in digital exhibition. In this study, we focus on social media as a central site where voluntourists from “Western” countries engage in digital exhibitionism to share and reflect on their experiences and websites as central sites for voluntourist organizations to engage in a similar practice as a tool in the recruitment of voluntourists. To understand the discursive and promotional strategies organizations use to recruit voluntourists and the ways in which voluntourists present their experiences and host communities online, we analyze public posts, hashtags, and websites related to voluntourism across social media platforms. We find these online interactions reproduce relationships of colonial domination in a postcolonial world, as the digital practices of voluntourist organizations and voluntourists themselves practice “othering” through the (re)production of white savior narratives. Our findings indicate voluntourists and their organizations must critically interrogate their (un)ethical online practices whilst reckoning with the colonial legacy of voluntourism.
Resident-led Tours: A Form of Resistance View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carolin Lusby, Natalia Marques da Silva
Traditional mass tourism has offered tours that introduce tourists to aspects of a city on pre defined circuits. These standardized narration tours have excluded topics and locations of local value, especially of they challenge dominant discourse. This study asks whose stories are being omitted. Examples from Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon show how small-scale, resident-led tours can counter these, by focusing on African heritage, colonization and enslavement. These guides show a sense of agency in how their community is narrated and how they play a role in developing tourism initiatives. The study concludes with feedback from tourists and highlights these tours as a form of activism which celebrates local culture and uniqueness.
Precarious Employment in Tourism in Spain View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jorge Seva Ródenas
This study develops an empirical analysis of labor precariousness in the Spanish tourism sector through a novel multidimensional approach. The study uses microdata from the Labour Force Survey to compare hospitality with the rest of the private sector in a context marked by significant temporary shocks that overlap with structural processes associated with phenomena such as increased digitalization and automation.
