Textual Flows of 'Visitors': Mediatization, Positioning Bodyscapes, and Multiple Semblances of Place

Abstract

With nationalistic sentiment on the rise around the world over the past decade, politicians have sought to estrange groups of people who ether or settle in a region, often deeming migrants or refugees as ‘others’. Stereotyping and orienting negative perceptions towards particular groups of people can threaten social sustainability in tourism regions. This work takes a geographical and socio-spatial justice lens to understand discriminate labeling through mediatized communications. This work helps us understand how different ‘visitors’ (refugees and tourists) are perceived in relation to each other in a tourism region (Mediterranean Europe). Where one group feels welcomed, another faces marginalization and discrimination. There is a need to consider this dichotomy in relation to how inbound mobility towards tourism destinations shapes not only perceptions of places, but how places are imagined as ideal for some groups, yet (almost) intentionally unmade for another group. This ‘othering’ of particular groups of people is increasingly apparent in the media. The paper looks at a point in time from 2015 to 2019 concerning Mediterranean European countries as popular destinations that saw visitors come from different directions and for vastly different purposes. Tourists would ascend to Greece, Italy, Malta, Republic of Cyprus, and Spain year-round, as did refugees whose destination entry-point is most commonly one of these five European countries according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Since 2015, rapid increases in arriving refugees led to the deemed “European Refugee Crisis”, also referred to as the “European Migrant Crisis”. The media began popularizing the arrival of refugees as an apparent crisis, and thus acted to marginalize refugees by associating their presence as a threat to tourism. This papers positions these overlapping communications of visitors as different constructions of bodyscapes in papers that offers narratives of tourists and refugees. Findings show that newspapers emphasis on spatial awareness, as storylines and narratives sought to ensure separation between visitors and refugees mediatization