Slum Tourism in the Americas: Commodifying Urban Poverty and Violence

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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.