Theorizing Mobility, Place and Adventure Tourism

Abstract

This chapter lays the foundation for the book by situating it within the subfield of the “sociolinguistics of tourism”. In this chapter I am concerned with various complex processes pertaining to tourism and of adventure tourism in particular. First, I am concerned with the circulation of people as both tourists and transnational migrant workers in two global adventure meccas since these two distinct groups of people are currently considered to be the largest groups traversing the world to date, but for very different socioeconomic and political reasons. Second, I am interested in the ways in which places are experienced, performed and sold, and thus adopt a performative approach to place in my discussion of place-making practices. Third, I am interested in the semiotic industry of tourism and the commodification of adventure both online and offline, where thrill, risk and safety of “embodied challenges” are bottled up, packaged and sold linguistically, visually and thus semiotically, where individuals’ identities and bodies are reassessed and imbued with cultural, social and network capital. Fourth, I am interested in current theories of mobility that epistemologically question the boundaries and breakdown between labor, migration and leisure happening in contemporary times where the circulation of individuals, material and symbolic resources are taking place at rapid speeds. This discussion centers around places of play where a kind of post-precariat workforce has emerged as a result of distinct labor and immigration policies that have been created in order to both facilitate and block movement of people between certain nation-states in order to remain competitive within the global new economy. How mobility is theoretically being accounted for and empirically captured in postmodern times does not only pertain to the participants of this study and my discussion of adventure tourism hubs, but also to me as a researcher and the methodological approach taken in this study, which is one of a global, multi-sited and mobile ethnography. Engaging in this type of method means that the research being carried out is inevitably epistemologically linked with mobility, and contributes to the existing literature on the sociolinguistics of tourism.