CeMoRe Seminar - Touring Poverty
Date: 3 November 2009 Time: 4.15pm to 6pm
Venue: Bowland North Seminar Room 20
At Prof Bianca Freire-Medeiros from Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV, Brazil) is visiting CemoRe until March 2010. Her research is with tourism and the consumption of experiences.
At the turn of the millennium, poverty has been framed as a product for consumption through tourism in a global scale. Which are the conditions of possibility for the emergence of this touristic poverty - a poverty consumed as a tourist commodity with a monetary value agreed upon by promoters and consumers? With this main question in mind, in the Summer of 2005 I and my research assistants started an intensive socioethnographic investigation whose main goal was to understand the turning of the largest favela (slum) in Rio de Janeiro into a into a much valued attraction for international tourists. Long interviews with qualified informants, field observation, participant observation in different tours, a photoethnographic approach, as well as brief incursions into other poverty-stricken areas which are also profitable tourist attractions - such as the Cape Flats (South Africa) and Dharavi (India) - allowed links between theory and practice to be drawn, setting Rocinha's case in a wider social and economic context. In my talk, I will attempt to explore the "touring poverty" phenomenon, using it as the basis for wider discussions on the politics of commodization of places, cultures, and people in a context of globalization and inequality.
Contact:
Who can attend: Anyone
Further information
Associated staff: Pennie Drinkall (Sociology)
Organising departments and research centres: Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe), Mobilities.Lab, Sociology
Keywords: Consumption, Mobilities, Tourism
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