Choreographies of Intervention: Performing Spatial Justice and the Politics of Mobility in Contested Tourism Grounds

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel explores forms of grassroots social change through the performativity of tourism space and the politics of tourism and labor mobility in contested transnational scenarios where tourism-informed alternative practices counteract official narratives and depictions of space. In so doing, these practices become critical agents in the development of emergent socio-political and spatial dynamics towards more inclusive forms of urban life.
The panel builds on communication studies, urban geography, social anthropology, and globalization and tourism studies to compare and contrast ethnographic research on solidarity tours in Palestine; walking and graffiti tours in Lebanon’s capital, Beirut; simulated border crossing experiences in a theme park in central Mexico; and boat tours in a UNESCO Natural Protected Area in the Gulf Coast of Mexico. In these four scenarios, dominant, official, and institutionalized tourism narratives and representations of place and otherness are counteracted by unofficial, subaltern and in some cases, illegal, tourism practices. These counter practices involve similar claims to spatial and social justice, and result in the creation of bottom-up, alternative topographies.
Solidarity tourism counter-practices in Palestine contrast with official depictions of US/Israel relations and question settler colonial logics depicting Palestinians as bounded and unreliable narrators through a play of immobility and mobility practices in tours that bring together Palestinian guides with international tourists wishing to experience dispossession firsthand. Similar to Palestinian tour guides, members of an indigenous community in central Mexico perform experiences of border crossing informed by their own crossing experiences while offering counter-narratives that speak to communal and cultural forms of resistance that creatively upset reductionist understandings of the border. In Beirut, alternative walking and graffiti city tours offer spatial interventions that penetrate into “forbidden” territories, counteracting the official fear-based ethnic and religious narratives that still divide contemporary urban life. And, similarly, in the Biosphere Ria Celestun, grassroots social and makeshift spatial interventions upset the state-led tourism industry’s depictions of the place as an a-historical, pristine natural resort, re-inscribing a history of dispossession and deprivation under international conservationist mandates.
These four scenarios exemplify the strengths of collective everyday and situated actions that bring together communities experiencing some form of state violence, be it in the form of military, religious, migratory, or conservation agendas.
Michaela D. Walsh is an Assistant Professor in Chicano Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University; Matilde Cordoba Azcárate is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at UC San Diego; Jenny Kelly is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Communication Department at UC San Diego; Erin Cory is a Postdoctoral Fellow of Refugee Studies at Malmö University, Sweden. Antonieta Mercado, an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of San Diego, will be the panel’s discussant. Her work focuses on indigenous resistance, nationalism, and transnational citizenship

Sub Unit

• Global Communication and Social Change

Individual Presentations

• Performing Thresholds, Challenging Geopolitical Borders: How a Simulated Border Crossing Experience in Central Mexico is Bringing International Awareness to the Plight of the Undocumented - Micaela Walsh, Bowling Green State U

• What Kind of Island? Sociospatial Interventions and the Control of Leisure Activities in a Mexican Natural Protected Area - Matilde Cordoba Azcarate, BINACOM - Binational Assoc. of Schls of Comm of the Californias

• Walking Beirut: Intervening in the Space-Time of a "Postwar" City - Erin Cory, Malmö U

• Power, Performance, and Pleasure: Witnesses In Palestine and the Violence of Evidence - Jennifer Kelly, U of California - San Diego

Respondent

• Antonieta Mercado, University Of San Diego