Tourism and Biopolitics in Pandemic Times

This edited collection brings together interventions on the geographies of tourism in pandemic times approached from a biopolitical perspective. Whilst the “management of bodies” has always been a constitutive part of tourism and its spatialities, the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted the emergence of entirely new “states of exception” and emergency regimes, geared towards tight restrictions and control over the mobility and embodied practices of millions of travelers and tourists. Debates in tourism over the “politics of life”, now more than ever, ought to concern health and wellbeing for both individuals and selected populations, not in the least because tourism has provided in many instances the socio-spatial conditions for the virus to spread. This book intends to show how a biopolitical analytical framework may provide a set of insights and critical perspectives that are key to the understanding of contemporary tourism practices and regimes of mobility, security, and in/exclusion – particularly in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Maartje Roelofsen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. Her research has examined digital transformations within the realm of tourism, urban space, and geography education. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Tourism Geographies and has recently published a monograph on ‘Hospitality, Home and Life in the Platform Economies of Tourism’ with Palgrave Macmillan.

Claudio Minca is a Professor of Geography at the University of Bologna. His research has focused on the geographies of tourism and travel and on the spatial theories of modernity. Recently he has been working on camp and refugee geographies, with a particular focus on the archipelago of refugee camps in the Balkan region. He has presently been awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant entitled ‘TheGAME: Counter-Mapping Informal Refugee Mobilities alongthe Balkan Route’.