Rodanthi Tzanelli

University of Leeds · School of Sociology and Social Policy

Shifting Borders exhibits ‘traces’ of human mobility across millennia: of exploratory journeys, forced migrations, exilic arrivals at foreign lands and artistic schematizations of them based on memory and experience. The traces assume the form of maps, passports, photographs of people and locations, as well as actual diaries of movement produced by...

The present article focuses on three dominant forms of crisis in the twenty-first century (terrorism, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic) that challenge tourism as a viable activity and sector. Through epistemological/methodological blends of compatible arguments from the sociology of knowledge (Karl Mannheim's notion of world-vision or Welta...

Contrary to the common compartmentalization of popular culture and events to specialized forms of fandom-induced tourism (e.g., film-, music-, sport-tourism), event-tourism spaces may also derive from blending different genres that enable symbiotic effects, for example, between sport and art. Such ‘in-between’ events are conducive to neo-tribal beh...

The article reviews the uses of the concept of biopolitics in critical tourism studies. After a brief genealogical account of the concept in political philosophy, it follows its transposition and its thematic applications in tourism theory and practice. It is argued that biopolitics is only one of the three key domains of ‘human interests’, which m...

L’article discute des utilisations du concept de biopolitique dans les études critiques sur le tourisme. Après un bref exposé généalogique du concept en philosophie politique, il suit sa transposition et ses applications thématiques dans la théorie et la pratique du tourisme. L’auteur affirme que la biopolitique n’est qu’un des trois domaines clés...

This article develops an analytical model to examine how heritage tourism mobilities are designed by travel writers. Using Sri Lanka as an example, we thematise professional activity in heritage tourism through a blend of Margaret Archer’s work on reflexivity in late modernity and Keith Hollinshead’s ‘worldmaking authority/agency’ to understand the...

This unique book considers COVID-19 as one pandemic amongst many, forming an episodic era of ebbing and flowing crises: the Virocene. Investigating COVID-19 in the context of the phenomenology of the crisis, it offers critical exploration of key theses in the study of mobility and futures, travel and citizenship. Through thought-provoking and insig...

Purpose Drawing on the discursive properties of placemaking theory, this paper discusses the development of film tourism in Crete from the release of the award-winning Zorba the Greek (dir. Michael Cacoyannis, ZG ) to date. The approach is “genealogical,” seeking to explain how ZG -inspired tourism on Crete ended up being more than about the film i...

A unique exhibition was held between 19 and 22 September 2018 in the deep blue waters of Amorgos, Greece.1 Amorgos is the easternmost of the Cyclades islands, neighboring the Dodecanese island group. The island's rich aquatic life and architectural beauty featured prominently in French director Luc Besson's internationally acclaimed English-languag...

Environmental sustainability and ecological aesthetics experience a turbulent affair when academic language is replaced by an artistic register: can we articulate contemporary crises stemming from uncontrolled mobilities, such as hyper-consumption, hyper-automobilities, and technological pollution, better by replacing sociological analysis with aff...

The article develops a theoretical framework for the critical examination of cinematic tourist design. Considering ‘film-induced tourism’ as part of a bigger system involving the design of mobilities, it interrogates the connection between the aesthetic and ethical principles that end up informing the engineering of national hospitality in media pl...

The desire and right to unfettered mobility often clash with the sociocultural classification of humans, challenging the ideal of just cosmopolitanism. The prevalence of inequality generates frictions in everyday life, which are repeated across different cultures, help to sustain ecologies of ‘bad ideas’ and produce fundamentalisms that likewise af...

Purpose This paper aims to examine the antagonistic coexistence of different tourism imaginaries in global post-viral social landscapes. Such antagonisms may be resolved at the expense of the ethics of tourism mobility, if not adjudicated by post-human reflexivity. Currently, unreflexive behaviours involve the refusal to conform to lifesaving “stay...

A unique exhibition was held between 19 and 22 September 2018 in the deep blue waters of Amorgos, Greece. Amorgos is the easternmost of the Cyclades islands, neighboring the Dodecanese island group. The island’s rich aquatic life and architectural beauty featured prominently in French director Luc Besson’s internationally acclaimed English-language...

In this reflective essay I revise the relationship between travel as an embodied secular journey and pilgrimage as a sacred ritual via examinations of websurfing as a form of virtual pilgrimage. My main premise is that virtual travel facilitated by the internet and through various digital platforms and collaborative social media should be considere...

Even though the term ‘critical thinking’ has been used wisely in social theory, policy and business studies alike, for some practitioners it still needs to better align with practical action in business. This entry generates an analytical map to this end: 1. I discuss the development of critical thinking in modernity. This section examines early tw...

For the new mobilities paradigm ways of encapsulating the realities of place/culture bring into conflict materialist modes of apprehension we associate with actor-network and non-representational theory, with more traditional hermeneutics focusing on the human subject. Examining urban mobilities with the use of technology, the chapter discusses syn...

I observe ‘Anthropocene’s’ potentially recurring overlap with ‘the Virocene’. The Anthropocene is posited as a geological age or period commencing with the Industrial Revolution, during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Contrariwise with this historically incremental, if at times discontinuous or n...

This article explores the paradoxical staging of experiences of ‘inhospitality’, taking shape as commercialized opportunities for individuals, willing to be voluntarily subjected to kidnapping. Such ‘extreme’ leisure is facilitated by companies specialising in simulated captivities of clients. These simulations, which blend forms of performance wit...

In our introduction to the special issue we attempt to reflect on the plurality and development of critical argumentation in tourism analysis. First, we adopt a "genealogical" approach to the parallel birth of critical thinking in early 20th century European social sciences and critical–institutional elaboration of the "tourist" and "tourism" as co...

In our introduction to the special issue we attempt to reflect on the plurality and development of critical argumentation in tourism analysis. First, we adopt a ‘genealogical’ approach to the parallel birth of critical thinking in early twentieth-century European social sciences and critical-institutional elaboration of the ‘tourist’ and ‘tourism’...

At the bottom of the sea, freedivers find that the world bestows humans with the magic of bodily and mental freedom, binding them in small communities of play, affect and respect for nature. On land, rational human interests dissolve this magic into prescriptive formulas of belonging to a profession, a nation and an acceptable modernity. The magica...

The article deconstructs media-induced tourist development’s relationship with “sustainability,” “ecology” and the “popular”. I highlight the interconnected, but often competing interpretations of “ecology” as interactions among technics (representational regimes), technological regimes and institutions (media, tourism), social agents (media/touris...

This paper explores the emerging phenomenon of ‘staged kidnapping’, a consumer-oriented experience in which individuals voluntarily subject themselves to abduction and associated experiences of detention, deprivation, interrogation and degradation. We explore the staging, presentation and consumption of voluntary abduction through an analysis of th...

The present short piece interrogates on the intersection of climate change, which results from a much deeper ecological crisis, and the tourist system. Based on the contributions of Tim Ingold, a British anthropologist who introduced the idea of “the relational perspective”, we lay the foundations towards a new (alternative) understanding of the is...

The chapter explores the emergence of morbid fantasy ‘terror camps’ in Israel and the West Bank as new forms of dark military tourism. Centring on scenarios of apprehending and killing fictional terrorists, who look suspiciously like Palestinian Arabs, the activity provides global tourists a chance to play the role of IDF soldiers in dramatic situa...

It is said that movies have encroached upon social realities creating tourism enclaves based on distortions of history and heritage, or simulations that disregard both. What localities and nation-states value are discarded, suppressed, or modified beyond recognition in neoliberal markets; thus flattening out human experience, destroying natural hab...

Praça Mauá, 1 – Centro, Rio de Janeiro – RJ, 20081-240, Brasil https://museudoamanha.org.br/en We are accustomed to museums full of heritage displays from bygone eras, helpfully “seriated” for the visitor to tell a story of linear human progress toward an “end”: the great metanarrative of (Western) modernity. This is not so with the Museu do Amanhã...

Praça Mauá, 1 – Centro, Rio de Janeiro – RJ, 20081-240, Brasil https://museudoamanha.org.br/en We are accustomed to museums full of heritage displays from bygone eras, helpfully “seriated” for the visitor to tell a story of linear human progress toward an “end”: the great metanarrative of (Western) modernity. This is not so with the Museu do Amanhã...

In this review article, Rodanthi Tzanelli notes that (today) "slum," "favela," or "township" tourism (i.e., visitations to urban sites of squalor and poverty for leisure, education, or philanthropy) has evolved into a mobility trend worthy of dedicated study by tourism scholars. She signposts relevant contemporary studies and arguments on the subje...

This chapter considers the proposal to develop three theme parks centering on a variety of outdoor activities (such as rock-climbing, ropejumping and trampolining) in the Northern city of Leeds, UK. The proposal, which signals a turn towards collaboration between public (Leeds City Council) and private (the independent “Go Ape” outdoor activities c...

The article provides a holistic appraisal of activist-artist Ai WeiWei’s work. It argues that, despite its topical innovations and evolution, it continues to be informed by narratives of ‘hospitality’ as an experiential form of engagement with variations of otherness (father, migrant, tourist and refugee). Dividing Ai’s artwork into two overlapping...

Atmosphere, the elusive ambiance of a place, enables or hinders its mobility in global consumption contexts. Atmosphere connects to social imaginaries, utopian representational frames producing the culture of a city or country. But who resolves atmospheric contradictions in a place’s social and cultural rhythms, when the eyes of the world are turne...

This paper focuses on what promotes ‘hospitality’ into a norm within polities, leading to further mobilities of humans, ideas and cross -cultural exchange in an ever more globalized world. On this, the social sciences identified an anchor in practices commonly known as reciprocity, which are based on gift exchange or giving -while -taking. As the a...

This paper focuses on what promotes 'hospitality' into a norm within polities, leading to further mobilities of humans, ideas and cross-cultural exchange in an ever more globalized world. On this, the social sciences identified an anchor in practices commonly known as reciprocity, which are based on gift exchange or giving-while-taking. As the argu...

The article explores the promotion of film-based tourism (cinematic tourism), with particular reference to the norms and practices regulating hospitality norms in cybersphere and terrestrially. Focusing on the rumoured tourist boom in the Greek island of Skopelos after the release of the Hollywood musical Mamma Mia! (2008), it singles out the filme...

Mega-events of the Olympic proportions have multiple consequences for their hosts. For Brazil, hosting two in a limited time (the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games of 2016) has energised diverse and bilateral movements of ideas, human resources, technologies and labour. Mobilities enabled by Western technology (the Internet and its socia...

In today’s world, the need to eliminate natural and human-made disasters has been at the forefront of national and international socio-political agendas. The management of risks such as terrorism, labour strikes, protests and environmental degradation has become pivotal for countries that depend on their economy’s tourist sector. Indeed, there is f...

The article interrogates the rationale and origins of changing imaginaries of tourism in Greece in the context of the current economic crisis. We detect a radical change in the ‘picture’ of the country that circulates in global media conduits (YouTube, Facebook, official press websites and personal blogs). We enact a journey into past media represe...

The focus of social scientific investigation on social ties as well as the roots of social disintegration has a long history, spanning at least two centuries. We are specifically interested in what promotes 'hospitality' into a norm within polities, leading to further mobilities of humans, ideas and cross-cultural exchange in an ever more globalize...

The paper examines how culturally situated worldviews survive in the technological spaces of late modernity in the context of the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, two cinematic enterprises that established New Zealand as an international tourist destination. It traces the narrative threads of the literary and cinematic plots in European cosmologic...

This paper suggests that the study of dark tourism or thana-tourism tends to reproduce some old conceptual and ideological models of research. This becomes evident when we consider the absence of cyber-epistemologies of dark tourism online and their covert communication with govern mobility or governing the social through mobility. Of primary focus...

This chapter focuses on the Northern Irish political-cultural context of cinematic tourism to consider how the televised adaptation of R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones informs territorialised claims over tourist flows in the province’s filmed locations. Defined by folk legends and gifted with natural riches, these Northern Irish sites are implicated b...

The adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s popular fantasy novels (1996-ongoing) into a TV series has been a marketing enterprise with calculated consequences. Filmed in a Belfast studio and on location elsewhere in Northern Ireland, Malta, Scotland, Croatia, Iceland, the United States, Spain and Morocco, and rolled over to six successful seasons by HB...

Only virtuous humans are supposed to move in time to meet their happy destiny or karma. The tale of Jamal in Slumdog Millionaire is such a case of serendipitous mobility towards riches and love - a 'journey' in which good heroes and urban communities respecting solidarity are successfully modernised. Unsurprisingly, the film became tangled in many...

The article explores the conditions that fostered an unlikely convergence between James Cameron's Avatar (2009) media industry, his and his colleagues' travel and activist pursuits in Brazil, and Chinese tourist planning. Focusing on one of the film's simulated landscape markers, Cameron's collaborative composition of an audiovisual “Pandorapedia”...

Las favelas o ciudades excluidas se han establecido como un aspecto importante de la geografía urbana ya sea por su patrimonio cultural como por la estética. Por décadas, el marketing se ha encargado de transformarlas en espacios de atracción para miles de turistas. No obstante, en los últimos años la tecnología digital y el turismo en espacios de...

In June 2014, Brazil opened the twentieth FIFA World Cup with a spectacular ceremony. Hosting the World Cup was a strategic developmental priority for Brazil: mega-events such as these allow the country to be ranked amongst the world's political and economic leaders, and are supposed to propel the country to its own unique modernity. But alongside...

An early twentieth-century anthropological term encapsulating ritualized transitions and changes of social status, “rites of passage” has been transformed in more recent political and cultural theory into a key concept. The term currently connects individual and collective status transformations to consumer contexts such as those of tourism mobilit...

One of the most prolific scholars of the 20th century, Ern(e)st Gellner (1925-95) remains a highly influential figure across many disciplines (sociology, history, anthropology and philosophy). The entry examines his contributions to the philosophy of social sciences, nationalism studies and the theory of ethnicity and religion, suggesting covert or...

The World cup transcends the interests of culture and nations worldwide. Every 4 years, delegations from the four corners of the world compete for a month. The mass tourist demand an event of this caliber generates prompts policy makers and tourism scholars to devote considerable time in planning in detail the infrastructure and service industry fo...

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This article explores emerging intersections between the consumption of mediated popular culture and the real and imagined topographies within which those representations are framed. Through an examination of the ‘televisual tourism’ centred around the successful TV series Breaking Bad, we scrutinise the multiple modes of sensorial and embodied tra...

The article explores the production of a cinematic tourist industry connected to Scottish landscapes and heritage with the release of Disney-Pixar’s animated fairy tale Brave (Andrews and Chapman, 2012). It contends that the first ever planned synergy between a creative industry and the country whose traditions and landscapes allegedly inspired the...

What is the role of gender in consolidating social identity and subjectivity? How has Conchita Wurst changed our aesthetics and political ethos?

Too much ink has been spent on examining the socio-economic conditions under which shantytowns emerge as urban enclaves and develop into unique lifeworlds. As 'cities within global cities', such as Delhi, Cape Town, Kingston, Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro (Frenzel Koens and Steinbrink 2012), but also as spaces declared by various constituencies in...

I discuss the staged performances in the London 2012 handover to Rio de Janeiro as marketable revisions of Brazil’s colonial history that lead to the artistic display of ideal types and ethnic characters for global audiences. Rio 2016’s project was placed in the hands of privileged urban natives (artistic directors) but based upon the aesthetic of...

The chapter explores recent transmutations of belly dancing into a digital narrative that fuses the discourse of ‘travelling cultures’ with that of embodied, mobile technologies that define ethnographic work: video recording, participant observation and experiential associations with the studied subjects. Despite its numerous ethnic archaeologies,...

The Greek government’s decision to close ERT has been criticised in various activist channels as anti-democratic or even irrational. Yet these activists and opponents of the ERT decision are held together only by thin strands and, in truth, represent heterogenous and conflicting interests and agendas.

In recent decades ceremonies stood in Olympiads as both vehicles of cultural values and shows embracing the banal and the everyday. But how much do we understand them as forms of public art? This book examines the London 2012 opening and closing ceremonies and the handover event to Rio for the 2016 Olympics as articulations of national and cosmopol...

What happens to traditional conceptions of ‘heritage’, in the era of fluid media spaces? ‘Heritage’ usually involves intergenerational transmission of ideas, customs, ancestral lands, and artefacts, and so serves to reproduce national communities over time. However, media industries have the power to transform national lands and histories into gene...

What happens to traditional conceptions of ‘heritage’, in the era of fluid media spaces? ‘Heritage’ usually involves intergenerational transmission of ideas, customs, ancestral lands, and artefacts, and so serves to reproduce national communities over time. However, media industries have the power to transform national lands and histories into gene...