Theorizing Slum Tourism: Performing, Negotiating and Transforming Inequality

Abstract

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

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