This Exploration focuses on the emerging field of slum tourism research, which has the potential to connect Latin American and Caribbean studies on tourism and urban inequality. Slum tourism involves transforming poverty, squalor and violence into a tourism product. Drawing on both altruism and voyeurism, this form of tourism is a complex phenomenon that raises various questions concerning power, inequality and subjectivity. This essay seeks to advance the theoretical debate on slum tourism research and to stimulate comparative studies. Introducing brief examples of slum tourism in Mexico and Jamaica, this contribution moves towards an initial theorization of the performance, negotiation and transformation of inequality in a framework of tourism and global mobilities. Keywords: tourism, inequality, urban poverty, Mexico, Jamaica.Several decades worth of research have been conducted on tourism developments in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, the bulk of this research has focused on non-urban tourism. Similarly, while urban inequalities have been the focus of much work on the region's cities, limited attention has been paid to urban tourism. This Exploration seeks to draw attention to the emerging field of slum tourism research, which has the potential to connect studies on tourism and urban inequality.Slum tourism has been evolving quickly across the world, with a number of well-known cases in Latin American and Caribbean cities, and particularly in Brazil. The phenomenon has been gaining increasing attention both within the tourism industry and as a topic of scholarly research. It has also been the focus of growing debate amongst a broader public, triggering a controversy on tourism and poverty alleviation, voyeurism, ethics and exploitation. In scholarly research, approaches to slum tourism remain largely fragmented and characterized by a plethora of case studies based on different approaches and disciplines. Comparative research and theoretical contributions addressing more conceptual concerns are still scarce.The majority of recent empirical research on slum tourism, with key studies emerging in the field of geography, has focused on commercial, entrepreneurial tours offered in Brazil, South Africa and India (Freire-Medeiros 2008;Rolfes 2010). These studies tend to focus on tourism as a form of consumption, rather than asking how a broader range of actors connect in the 'slum tourist encounter ' (cf. Cohen 1984;Crouch 2007) to convert the slum into a tourism product. However, there are recent attempts to create a forum for discussion and exchange amongst researchers in this field (www.slumtourism.net), to go beyond single case studies and address more general issues. This is reflected in the first international conference on slum tourism, which took place at the University of Bristol in 2010, and resulted in an edited volume ) and a special journal edition

The emergent field of ‘sensory urbanism’ studies how socio-spatial boundaries are policed through sensorial means. Such studies have tended to focus on either formal policies that seek to control territories and populations through a governance of the senses, or on more everyday micro-politics of exclusion where conflicts are articulated in a sensory form. This article seeks to extend this work by concentrating on contexts where people deliberately seek out sensory experiences that disturb their own physical sense of comfort and belonging. While engagement across lines of sensorial difference may often be antagonistic, we argue for a more nuanced exploration of sense disruption that attends to the complex political potential of sensory urbanism. Specifically, we focus on the politics of sensation in tours of low-income urban areas. Tourists enter these areas to immerse themselves in a different environment, to be moved by urban deprivation and to feel its affective force. What embodied experiences do tourists and residents associate with urban poverty? How do guides mobilise these sensations in tourism encounters, and what is their potential to disrupt established hierarchies of socio-spatial value? Drawing on a collaborative research project in Kingston, Mexico City, New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro, the article explores how tours offer tourists a sense of what poverty feels like. Experiencing these neighbourhoods in an intimate, embodied fashion often allows tourists to feel empathy and solidarity, yet these feelings are balanced by a sense of discomfort and distance, reminding tourists in a visceral way that they do not belong.

This article draws attention to a controversial activity in poor urban neighborhoods. Slum tourism is a growing business worldwide and simultaneously it is a new form of encounter between the global South and the global North. Following the new mobilities paradigm, I investigate a particular form of slum tourism, which intertwines urban poverty and charity, representation and powerful imaginaries, tourist mobility and transnational lifestyles. This is the case in Mazatlán, Mexico, where a multidenominational church offers regular tours to the city's garbage dump. I scrutinize the various modes of (im)mobilities and their implications for peoples and places, interconnecting spheres which are conceived of as separate. In conclusion, I outline the ambiguous effects when marginalized spaces become integral parts of the urban representation. Résumé Cet article attire l’attention sur une activité discutable qui se déroule dans les quartiers urbains pauvres. Un tourisme de la misère se développe dans tous les pays et, parallèlement, constitue un type original de confrontation Nord‐Sud. Le nouveau modèle de la mobilité permet d’étudier une forme particulière de ‘tourisme des bidonvilles’, qui mêle étroitement pauvreté urbaine et charité, représentation et imaginaires profonds, mobilité des touristes et styles de vie transnationaux. C’est le cas à Mazatlán, au Mexique, où une Église multiconfessionnelle propose régulièrement des excursions à la décharge municipale. Les divers modes de mobilités et d’immobilités, ainsi que leurs implications pour les populations et les lieux, sont étudiés en interconnectant des sphères qui sont censées être séparées. La conclusion expose brièvement les effets ambigus lorsque des espaces marginalisés deviennent des parties intégrantes de la représentation urbaine.

This article explores a tour to the garbage dump in the city of Mazatlán, northern Mexico, as an alternative to mass tourism. The tour, conducted by an evangelical North American church, is conceptualized as a non-profit, eye-opening experience for affluent tourists. I frame the tour as a particular kind of slum tourism, which is embedded in Christian values and promises a meaningful tourist experience by helping the poor. Drawing on an ethnographic approach, I argue that the interplay of globalization processes and local conditions in Mazatlán produces a particular framework in which slum tours emerge and work. The analysis reveals that this tour is a consequence of revised forms of tourism, transnational lifestyles and global forces at work in the North American-Mexican relationships. I stress that research needs to draw further attention to slum tourism's positioning in wider structural and historical contexts in order to understand its idiosyncratic features.

No abstract