Which Sociology of Urban Tourism in the Day After Viral Society?

Abstract

The contemporary pandemic conjuncture may lead to a ‘viral society', an unprecedent social paradigm involving deep economic, political, and cultural transformations. To cope with this globally unstable situation, it is urgent to deconstruct and reconstruct knowledge (e.g., through a social and sociological Encyclopedia of Viral Tourism addressing a particular genealogy of research on tourism studies and to be disseminated via a Virtual Sociological Museum). The author invokes here recent debates and his own personal research. Epistemologically, the pertinence of a hybrid and open research and several theoretical topics and case studies on tourism are discussed, for example, tourism articulated with the COVID-19 pandemic and the encounter of this viral tourism conjuncture with the war in Ukraine, which defines a new breed of war tourism. Regarding methodologies, the author converses on Hybrid Discourse Analysis and Visual, Virtual, and Viral Methods, such as sociological comics, video papers, artistic sociology, and sociological augmented reality.