On Avatar: digital commerce as activist pedagogy?

Contemporary media allow digital environments to function as transnational classrooms, a multidimensional public sphere accessible to people with Internet connection. This generates ethical dilemmas, including the right to represent groups with incomplete civic rights and restricted access to representational centers. James Cameron’s Avatar (2009)–Amazon Watch–International Rivers (Amazon Watch, n.d.) marriage responds to this phenomenon through uses of digital communication as both profitable enterprise and activist means. The film narrated the interplanetary corporate destruction of another moon’s—Pandora—ecosystem and civilization for its natural resources. But in search of interesting locales to photograph, Avatar’s computer generating image professionals stumbled upon the tribes of the Amazonian rainforest whose culture and livelihood face extinction due to a government-backed multibillion project to build the Belo connexions • international professional communication journa

'The Greek Fall: Simulacral Thanatotourism in Europe'

The paper explores the socio-cultural dynamics of Greek demonstrations in 2011, suggesting that their function exceeds that of social movements as we know them. A form of what I term ‘simulacral thanatotourism’, including marches and demonstrations to Greek cities in protest for austerity measures, actualised in this context a form of mourning about the end of Greece’s place in European polity. This mourning, which places Greece at the centre of a withering European democratic cosmos, inspires in today’s dystopian Greek Raum two conflicting forms of social action: one is geared towards consumption of the country’s political history in terms similar to those we examine as ‘tourism’. This symbolic consumption of history re-writes the European past from a Greek standpoint while simultaneously promoting relevant entrepreneurial initiatives – in particular, the global circulation of imagery linked to riots and protests and thus the movement of the abject aspects of Greek culture in global spaces. The second form of action is directed against the image of contemporary Greece as a corrupt topos that does not deserve a place in Europe’s political Paradise; this places the blame for the nation’s demise on its political factions. The two forms of action may be antithetical but do coexist in Greek social movements to the date, articulating a cosmology of nostalgia for Greece as an idyllic tourist object. The paper explores these themes through the proliferation of imagery in recent demonstrations, highlighting how a tourist-like marketing of activist visual culture partakes in reproductions of theological ideas rooted in Europeanist discourse

Solitary Amnesia as National Memory: From Habermas to Luhmann

The repressive mechanisms of collective memory have been the subject of a fierce debate in the human sciences - especially, but not exclusively, in the study of nationalism. This paper re-investigates the nature of national memory in the context of European nationalisms by drawing on contemporary national cases of remembering and forgetting. The explored instances are mobilized in the study of remembering/forgetting on a factual, rather than ideal level. Theoretically, it is argued that the Habermassian call for fostering ‘anamnestic solidarity’ with the past often fails in practice because of its normative undertones that disagree with Realpolitic demands. This is so because nationalist discourse, which serves to preserve the political interests of the national community, has to present itself to political forces that reside outside the community as a closed, autopoetic system akin to that theorized by Niklas Luhmann. Although the Luhmannian thesis (which would gesture towards the autonomisation of national memory) also fails to explain the nature of nationalist remembering/forgetting tout court, it allows more space for an exploration of nationalist self-presentation than Habermas’ normative stance. The argument in this study, which combines an appreciation of hermeneutics and autopoeia, is that the practice of (re)producing the ‘nation’s’ solitary amnesia enables nationalist discourse to respond to external political pressures. This presents the latter as a dialogical/hermeneutic project despite its solipsistic ‘façade’

Virtual Mega-event Imaginaries and Worldmaking Imperatives in Rio 2016

Mega-events of the Olympic proportions have multiple consequences for their hosts. For Brazil, hosting two in a limited time (the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games of 2016) has energised diverse and bilateral movements of ideas, human resources, technologies and labour. Mobilities enabled by Western technology (the Internet and its social media circuits) seem to have the most notable impact on the style and principles of Brazilian self-presentation to the world, thus making, demaking and remaking Brazilian character as a commodity. More specifically, the developing Rio 2016 website seems to project particular Brazilian worldviews to global audiences while concealing other, less palatable social realities (such as those of favela poverty, unemployment and protest) to potential visitors. Whereas favela cultures and the culture of Brazilian protest have diachronically contributed to the development of Brazilian socio-cultural identity and well-being, they have been side-lined or beautified in these digital self-narrations. The chapter takes a balanced view on these omissions and representations in view of the real pressures national polities have to address in international mega-event markets. It considers these digital discourses as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, they align particular versions of Brazilian ethno-cultural self-narration with cosmopolitan cultures of travel to enable Brazil’s belonging in an international community of nations; on the other, they allow neoliberal networks to take over the governance of ethno-national habitus, thus either excluding vulnerable populations or coercing them into joining unregulated (tourist/consumption) markets in a battle for survival. Through an analysis of the Rio 2016’s web content, it is suggested that the host city’s creative imaginaries of habitus prioritise ideas of safe cosmopolitan travel, happiness and civilised exoticism to design and fully align Brazilian self-narration with the expectations of the global tourist gaze, ear, nose and palate. Whereas such self-presentations support a radical vision of Brazilianness in relation to well-being (communicating with embodied vividness, friendliness, hospitality and an ‘open’ reciprocal ethos), as tourist imaginaries they provide a partial view of the country’s socio-cultural realitie

Embodied art and aesthetic performativity in the London 2012 handover to Rio (2016)

I discuss the staged performances in the London 2012 handover to Rio de Janeiro as marketable revisions of Brazil’s colonial history that lead to the artistic display of ideal types and ethnic characters for global audiences. Rio 2016’s project was placed in the hands of privileged urban natives (artistic directors) but based upon the aesthetic of socio-cultural marginality (black ‘racial types’, samba dancers, capoeira and Candomblé performers,‘bad men’). Communicating metropolitan Brazil’s attachment to European artistic narratives, the ceremony enmeshed all these types and styles into Rio’s self-presentation as a tourist ‘topos’ that was born out of past global mobilities of humans, customs and labour

Tourism in the European economic crisis: Mediatised worldmaking and new tourist imaginaries in Greece

The paper interrogates the rationale and origins of changing imaginaries of tourism in Greece in the context of the current economic crisis. We detect a radical change in the ‘picture’ of the country that circulates in global media conduits (YouTube, Facebook, official press websites and personal blogs). We enact a journey into past media representations of Greece as an idyllic peasant and working-class site, but proceed to highlight that such representations are being recycled today by Greeks living and studying abroad. This stereotype, which focuses on embodied understandings of happiness and well-being is being challenged by the current economic crisis. In its place, we detect the emergence of a new dark and slum imaginary, propagated by both native and global intellectuals-activists. The new imaginary both tests in practice and bears the potential to re-invent Greece as a tourist destination. Not only is the change informed by the European histories of art, slum and dark tourism focusing on middle-class refinement and philanthropy, it also bears the potential to promote Greece as a cultural tourist destination in global value hierarchies in controversial ways

“Post-viral tourism’s antagonistic tourist imaginaries”

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the antagonistic coexistence of different tourism imaginaries in global post-viral social landscapes. Such antagonisms may be resolved at the expense of the ethics of tourism mobility, if not adjudicated by post-human reflexivity. Currently, unreflexive behaviours involve the refusal to conform to lifesaving ‘‘stay-at-home’’ policies, the tendency to book holidays and the public inspection of death zones. Design/methodology/approach – Each of the consumption styles explored in this paper to discuss post-COVID-19 tourism recovery corresponds to at least one tourist imaginary, antagonistically placed against social imaginaries of moral betterment, solidarity, scientific advancement, national security and labour equality. A multi-modal collection of audio-visual and textual data, gathered through social media and the digital press, is categorised and analysed via critical discourse analysis. Findings – Data in the public domain suggest a split between pessimistic and optimistic attitudes that forge different tourism futures. These attitudes inform different imaginaries with different temporal orientations and consumption styles. Social implications – COVID-has exposed the limits of the capacity to efficiently address threats to both human and environmental ecosystems. As once popular tourist locales/destinations are turned by COVID-2019s spread into risk zones with morbid biographical records their identities alter and their imaginaries of suffering become anthropocentric. Originality/value – Using Castoriadis’ differentiation between social and radical imaginaries, Foucault’s biopolitical analysis, Sorokin’s work on mentalities and Sorel’s reflections on violence, the author argue that this paper has entered a new phase in the governance and experience of tourism, which subsumes the idealistic basis of tourist imaginaries as cosmopolitan representational frameworks under the technocultural imperatives of risk, individualistic growth through the adventure (‘‘edgework’’) and heritage preservation. This paper also needs to reconsider the contribution of technology (not technocracy) to sustainable post-COVID-19 scenarios of tourism recovery

Virtual pilgrimage: An irrealist approach

In this reflective essay I revise the relationship between travel as an embodied secular journey and pilgrimage as a sacred ritual via examinations of websurfing as a form of virtual pilgrimage. My main premise is that virtual travel facilitated by the internet and through various digital platforms and collaborative social media should be considered as a novel secular form of metamovement we can approach as a pilgrimage. This pilgrimage produces multiple versions of reality ("world versions"), both in collaboration with corporate internet design and independently from it. Because such nonembodied secular engagement with other places and cultures produces online "travel" communities, digital pilgrimage prompts us to revisit John Urry's "tourist gaze" thesis and Keith Hollinshead's "worldmaking authority" in a critical fashion. Critical reconsideration of these two influential theses involves a closer inspection of metamovement for its aesthetic parameters, as well as their affording of creative connections between the mind (internalism) and the world (externalism) as a form of travel. Such connections can also assist in the production of conventional tourism mobilities