Slum Tourism in the Americas: Commodifying Urban Poverty and Violence

这个三方研究项目调查了美洲四个城市的贫民窟旅游：洛杉矶、墨西哥城、金斯敦和里约热内卢。利用多站点人种学方法，本项目将在全球流动和城市景观政治经济的背景下，对城市贫困和暴力的商品化进行理论化。这项研究有两个重点，一个是贫民窟之旅的政治经济学，另一个是他们的代表性-表现性政治。它的目标是问：不同的参与者通过什么代表性策略来谈判贫民窟的“世界地位”？作为基于文化生产和消费的符号经济的一部分，暴力是如何被审美化和表演的？通过“贫民窟旅游柜台”，在贫民窟居民、游客、旅游经营者和国家行为者之间产生了哪些新的社会关系和主体性？我们对贫民窟旅游的做法是原创的，而且很重要，原因如下。首先，我们的跨城市比较研究将使我们能够区分一般模式和个别城市的特殊特征。这一点尤其重要，因为贫民窟之旅越来越受欢迎，在构成全球范围内城市贫困的表现方面也越来越有影响力。其次，在现有工作主要关注作为消费者的游客的地方，我们也提出了如何在“贫民窟游客遭遇”中更广泛的行动者联系起来，将贫民窟转化为旅游产品的问题。第三，这种对生产和消费的关注与项目对贫民窟之旅中暴力的审美化和表现的中心关注有关。最后，这个项目在方法论上是创新的：它的多地点、纵向和民族志研究既是对大多数现有贫民窟旅游方法的挑战，也是对“遭遇”的表现进行询问的最合适手段，以建立关于贫困和暴力的知识。研究结果将与学术和非学术利益相关者（居民、民间社会、城市发展和旅游政策制定者）相关。三方研究是连接各国学科传统和发展欧洲跨学科城市研究的持续努力的一部分。

This trilateral research project investigates slum tourism in four cities in the Americas: Los Angeles,Mexico City, Kingston, and Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnographic approach, this projectaims to theorise the commodification of urban poverty and violence in the context of global mobilitiesand urban political economies of spectacle. The research has a twin focus on the political economy ofslum tours and their representational-performative politics. Its objectives are to ask: Through whatrepresentational strategies do different actors negotiate the slum's "place-in-the-world"? How is violenceaestheticised and performed as part of symbolic economies based on cultural production andconsumption? What new social relationships and subjectivities are produced through the "slum tourismencounter" between slum-dwellers, tourists, tour operators and state actors? Our approach to slumtourism is original and important for several reasons. First, our cross-city, comparative research willallow us to distinguish between generalisable patterns and the idiosyncratic features of individual cities.This is particularly relevant as slum tours are increasingly popular and influential in constituting therepresentations of urban poverty on a global scale. Second, where existing work largely focuses ontourists as consumers, we also ask how a broader range of actors connect in the "slum tourist encounter"to convert the slum into a tourism product. Third, this attention to both production and consumptionlinks to the project's central focus on the aestheticisation and performance of violence in slum tours.Finally, this project is innovative methodologically: its multi-sited, longitudinal and ethnographic researchis both a challenge to most existing methodologies on slum tourism and the most appropriate means tointerrogate the performativity of the "encounter", to establish knowledge on poverty and violence. Theresults will be relevant for academic and non-academic stakeholders (residents, civil society, urbandevelopment and tourism policymakers). The trilateral research is part of on-going efforts to connectnational disciplinary traditions and develop European interdisciplinary urban studies.