Slum Tourism in the Americas: Commodifying Urban Poverty and Violence

这个三边研究项目调查了美洲四个城市的贫民窟旅游业：洛杉矶、墨西哥城、金斯顿和里约热内卢。该项目采用多地点人种学方法，旨在将全球流动性和景观城市政治经济背景下的城市贫困和暴力商品化理论化。研究有一个双重重点的政治经济学的贫民窟图尔斯和他们的代表表演政治。它的目标是问：通过什么代表性的战略做不同的行为者谈判贫民窟的'在世界上的位置'？暴力是如何被审美化并作为基于文化生产和消费的象征经济的一部分来表现的？通过贫民窟居民、游客、旅游经营者和国家行为者之间的“贫民窟旅游遭遇”，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，也是重要的，原因有几个。首先，我们的跨城市比较研究将使我们能够区分可概括的模式和个别城市的特殊特征。这一点尤其重要，因为贫民窟图尔斯之旅越来越受欢迎，越来越有影响力，在全球范围内成为城市贫困的代表。第二，现有的工作主要集中在游客作为消费者，我们还问如何更广泛的行为者连接在“贫民窟游客遭遇”转换成旅游产品的贫民窟。第三，这种对生产和消费的关注与该项目对贫民窟图尔斯之旅中暴力行为的审美化和表现的中心重点有关。最后，该项目在方法上具有创新性：它的多地点、纵向和人种学研究既是对大多数现有贫民窟旅游方法的挑战，也是询问“贫民窟”的表演性、建立关于贫穷和暴力的知识的最适当手段。研究结果将与学术和非学术利益攸关方（居民、民间社会、城市发展和旅游业决策者）相关。三边研究是连接国家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 project aims to theorise the commodification of urban poverty and violence in the context of global mobilities and urban political economies of spectacle. The research has a twin focus on the political economy of slum tours and their representational-performative politics. Its objectives are to ask: Through what representational strategies do different actors negotiate the slum's 'place-in-the-world'? How is violence aestheticised and performed as part of symbolic economies based on cultural production and consumption? What new social relationships and subjectivities are produced through the 'slum tourism encounter' between slum-dwellers, tourists, tour operators and state actors? Our approach to slum tourism is original and important for several reasons. First, our cross-city, comparative research will allow 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 the representations of urban poverty on a global scale. Second, where existing work largely focuses on tourists 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 consumption links 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 research is both a challenge to most existing methodologies on slum tourism and the most appropriate means to interrogate the performativity of the 'encounter', to establish knowledge on poverty and violence. The results will be relevant for academic and non-academic stakeholders (residents, civil society, urban development and tourism policymakers). The trilateral research is part of on-going efforts to connect national disciplinary traditions and develop European interdisciplinary urban studies.