Ninth International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

Refugee camps have famously been conceptualized as stationary physical spaces, concrete containers of undesirable people, and isolated, forgotten places. More recently, though, refugee camps have also become notable tourist attractions, a particularly notable phenomenon in the West Bank. As visitors flock to Palestinian refugee camps, they engage in a long-standing tourist ritual of photography, though now with a contemporary twist: tourists are documenting their vacations on social media. In ‘posting’, tourists actively and persuasively relay particular narratives about the visited site—the Palestinian refugee camp. This paper positions tourists’ media content on tour as a form of multimodal rhetoric—a means of persuasion and argumentation through oral, textual, and visual methods. As tourists in the camp post to sites like Instagram, they represent camp space, framing it in ways that contribute to or negotiate its perceived values and meanings. Tourists’ social media posts constitute a type of advertisement, replete with specific and meaningful persuasive messages. When the rhetoric of the camp is digitized, it transforms the camp into a camp-as-rhetoric, turning outside viewing audiences into virtual tourists of camp spaces. Unlike the camp itself, the camp-as-rhetoric promoted on tourists’ social media accounts can travel. Thus, using rhetorical analysis of semi-structured interviews and social media posts, I contend that ‘camp-ness’ can be reconceptualized as a traveling rhetoric, rather than an architecturally defined space. By engaging in and extending traditional tourist photographic rituals, tourists digitally reframe the stationary and isolated physical space of the camp as a mobile, hybrid, and rhetorical one—a traveling rhetoric.