Performativities,pandemic pressures and ‘patchwork’ tourism places: Editor-in-Chief notes

Pandemic pressures, transformations and everyday tourism practices

The notion of pandemic pressures, individual and place transformations and their related social practices runs through Di Matteo and Daminelli (2024) work on volunteer tourism in the Mediterranean island of Lesvos and Ren et al.’s (2024) study of tour guides in China. In Di Matteo and Daminelli (2024) autoethnography, the island received a constant flow of volunteer tourists who began working on the island in 2015. Their study departs from mainstream volunteer tourism research by engaging on the complexities brought about by several crises which hit the camp between 2019 and 2022 – the COVID-19 pandemic, the fire at Moria camp and the ascendence of far-right politics and policies in Greece. These complexities and crises impacted both refugees and volunteer workers on the island. Di Matteo & Daminelli draw on their autoethnographies in the camp and on the island to share their experiences and observations of the crises, painting a more nuanced and critical story of volunteer tourism – one that steers away from essentialising refugees as necessarily ‘vulnerable’. Over in pandemic-hit China, Ren et al. (2024) examined how the role of tour guides has undergone a transformation from one focused on serving to one that encompasses the facilitation of positive changes at tourism places. The pandemic is found to have provided the environment for tour guides in China to engage with technology and social media platforms to customise their tours. It also created the need for tour guides to step into the role of a tracker and observer of viral pandemic control measures and an advisor of health products, pandemic measures and specialised adventure pursuits, amongst others.

Both studies have drawn on the stressful and uncertain times during the viral pandemic to discuss established research themes in tourism and have shown how COVID-19 can strain the lives of different communities and reshape tourism work. They built on Tourist Studies’ existing efforts at understanding the viral pandemic and its aftermath and how tourism can proceed during or emerge after COVID-19 (see e.g. Duffy and Mair, 2021; Gibson, 2021; Heimtun and Viken, 2023; Ong et al., 2023). For instance, Duffy and Mair (2021) chart the course for festival research and identified how festivals will remain relevant in post-viral times and how their resilience is bound up with their everydayness and mundaneness. Heimtun and Viken (2023) discuss the ways in which Norwegian tourists made sense of infection preventive measures and the ways in which they changed travel habits and whether, with the enforced non-travel during pandemic times, the pandemic transformed their thinking on tourism and climate change. They conclude pessimistically that the heightened awareness during their non-travel and travel pause in pandemic times is not sufficient to overcome the modern tourism consumptive system driven by neoliberal ideals of freedom of movements.

They also speak to a corpus of work in the journal concerning the conditions of tourism work and the plights and triumphs of tourism workers (Cheong et al., 2023; Dumbrăveanu et al., 2016; Veijola, 2009). Notably, Minca’s (2009) ‘The Island: Work, Tourism and the Biopolitical’, a classic in Tourist Studies, pioneered the field’s understanding of the biopolitical nature of tourism work and its embeddedness in neoliberal consumptive cultures. Particularly, Minca’s article draws on the Hollywood film The Island to tease out real-life tourism parallels to the human ‘spare-parts’ production line thematic trope where tourism workers are reduced to mere units of production. A high degree of docility of both the tourism worker and the tourists is required in such encampments, which further parallels the challenges and struggles of two forms of tourism work and workers in our two papers in this issue – Di Matteo and Daminelli’s refugee camp and Ren’s country under strict pandemic controls. Ren et al.’s study also adds to our nascent set of critical studies on tour guides and tour guiding (Garner, 2017; Ren, 2022).

Text, technology and tourism performativities

The roles of smart technology, filmic and social media texts and tourism place performances connect our next two articles. Schiavone and Brandellero (2024) examine apps and maps as deployed in film tours and their utilities in shaping film tourism experiences and experiences with place in Edinburgh, Scotland. Via games, travel advice and active engagement, film media apps are found to extend film tourism experiences into rich multi-layered ones. Projections and place-making of a different nature are examined by Tham et al. (2024). Using the case of Malaysian town Penang, Tham and his colleagues reveal how the social processes involving the performativity of TikTok videos are orchestrated by different users with the destination as the backdrop. Tham et al.’s work showcases how TikTok videos can further our understandings of (re)presentation in tourism and how tourism social media could be deployed to engage various target markets and stakeholders. These two articles add to our recent (Barry, 2021; Deng, 2023; Xu et al., 2020) and established work (Hale, 2001; Iwashita, 2006; Mazierska, 2002) on tourism images, imagination and representations in Tourist Studies where authors variously argued for the dissecting and dismantling of power structures underpinning gendered, capitalistic and/or nationalistic tourism representations.

Patchwork

Resonating with the critical, interpretive and qualitative orientation of the journal, the metaphor of a ‘patchwork’ had also been employed, in Schiavone and Brandellero’s (2024) interrogation of the multi-mediated and multi-layered aspects of experiences of Edinburgh’s app-based film tourism and Di Matteo and Daminelli (2024) conceptualisation of their fieldwork at Lesvos’ refugee camp as a ‘comparative patchwork autoethnography’. Such ‘patchwork’ approaches signal the incompleteness of any given standpoint, the need for layers of meanings and meaning-makings and the complicated richness of our tourism worlds. In doing so, the authors have responded to the calls of the critical tourism scholars who founded and supported Tourist Studies and resisted the tide of tourism research built on positivistic framings.

The production of such critical tourism patchworks is ultimately founded on the generosity and labour of our Tourist Studies community – reviewers who selflessly read and comment on manuscripts, editorial board members who advocate and advise on the direction of the journal, and authors who submit and contribute their fruits of labour. We thank one and all again and hope to be able to count on such a cordial and mutually supporting academic community for our work here at Tourist Studies in 2024.