Jennie Germann Molz

Eating Difference The Cosmopolitan Mobilities of Culinary Tourism

This article examines the intersecting mobilities that are involved in culinary tourism. The term culinary tourism refers to practices of exploratory eating, especially in which unfamiliar foods ar...

Getting a “Flexible Eye”: Round-the-World Travel and Scales of Cosmopolitan Citizenship

The “flexible eye” describes a particularly cosmopolitan perspective derived through mobility, detachment and multiplicity as opposed to rooted-ness or national affiliation. In this article, I explore the extent to which the “flexible eye” serves as an apt metaphor for the spatial and civic affiliations enacted by round-the-world travellers. The discussion here is based on research that examines the narratives travellers publish online while travelling around the world. Drawing on recent academic work on cosmopolitanism and global citizenship, I investigate the way a discourse of cosmopolitan citizenship circulates in these narratives. In particular, I examine the way travellers frame these related activities—moving around the world and sharing their experiences via the Internet—in terms of civic responsibility. Travellers respond to a sense of obligation to produce tolerance, interconnectedness and cultural understanding out of encounters with difference. This formulation of a round-the-world trip as a civic obligation entails movement not only around the world, but also between national and global scales of belonging. How is cosmopolitan belonging filtered through practices of national citizenship? How are travellers both detaching from and re-attaching to notions of national identity in their quest for the “flexible eye” of the cosmopolitan citizen?The “flexible eye” describes a particularly cosmopolitan perspective derived through mobility, detachment and multiplicity as opposed to rooted-ness or national affiliation. In this article, I explore the extent to which the “flexible eye” serves as an apt metaphor for the spatial and civic affiliations enacted by round-the-world travellers. The discussion here is based on research that examines the narratives travellers publish online while travelling around the world. Drawing on recent academic work on cosmopolitanism and global citizenship, I investigate the way a discourse of cosmopolitan citizenship circulates in these narratives. In particular, I examine the way travellers frame these related activities—moving around the world and sharing their experiences via the Internet—in terms of civic responsibility. Travellers respond to a sense of obligation to produce tolerance, interconnectedness and cultural understanding out of encounters with difference. This formulation of a round-the-world trip as a c...

‘Watch us wander’: mobile surveillance and the surveillance of mobility

Social relations between geographically distant and mobile individuals are increasingly mediated through new information and communication technologies. In this paper I argue that the configuration of these mobile social relations can be understood through a model of interpersonal surveillance that, unlike hierarchical state structures of surveillance, constitutes a decentralised social relation between individuals. This shift may be characterised in the writings of Foucault as a move from the panopticon model of surveillance that mediates the relation between the state and the individual to his later writings on technologies of the self, which emphasise interaction between individuals as a source of self-discipline. Like the panopticon, this second form of surveillance also constitutes a power/knowledge regime that produces certain ways of seeing and certain objects of the ‘surveilling’ gaze. Drawing on empirical material from research on round-the-world travel websites, in this paper I outline the way metaphors of surveillance such as ‘watching’ and ‘following’ configure the mobile social relations that occur between travellers and their on-line audience.

The Social Affordances of Flashpacking: Exploring the Mobility Nexus of Travel and Communication

Abstract The proliferation of digital devices and online social media and networking technologies has altered the backpacking landscape in recent years. Thanks to the ready availability of online communication, travelers are now able to stay in continuous touch with friends, family and other travelers while on the move. This paper introduces the practice of ‘flashpacking’ to describe this emerging trend and interrogates the patterns of connection and disconnection that become possible as corporeal travel and social technologies converge. Drawing on the concepts of ‘assemblages’ and ‘affordances,’ we outline several aspects of this new sociality: virtual mooring, following, collaborating, and (dis)connecting. The conclusion situates this discussion alongside broader questions about the shifting nature of social life in an increasingly mobile and mediated world and suggests directions for future research at the intersection of tourism and technology.

Representing pace in tourism mobilities: staycations, Slow Travel and The Amazing Race

This article examines the way popular representations of tourism make sense of pace within the context of Western modernity and asks how certain ethical and ideological values come to be associated with speed, slowness or stillness. In the typical story of modernity, speed is commonly associated with positive values such as ‘freedom’ and ‘progress’, while slowness and stillness are often seen as marginal or undesirable modes of mobility. The analysis presented suggests that paying attention to pace and the way pace is socially encoded in media contexts reveals a more complicated narrative of mobility and modernity. The article draws on an analysis of media representations of three popular modes of tourism – the ‘staycation’, a neologism invented to describe vacationing at home; Slow Travel; an emerging social movement that advocates travelling slowly and locally; and the television programme The Amazing Race – to argue that the way pace is socially encoded in these representations is central not only to a more nuanced story of modernity, but also to a ‘politics of mobility’.

Global Abode Home and Mobility in Narratives of Round-the-World Travel

This article explores the way home is redefined within the context of new patterns of corporeal and mediated travel by examining the complex intersection of mobility, home, and belonging from the p...

Performing Global Geographies: Time, Space, Place and Pace in Narratives of Round-the-World Travel

Abstract This paper explores the spatio-temporal dimensions of round-the-world travel by focusing on the way travellers weave together space and time in their round-the-world itineraries. Through an analysis of the narratives that round-the-world travellers publish online and recount in interviews, the paper argues that round-the-world itineraries map place, time and tempo into a global geography. The paper suggests that pace is of particular importance in this performance of a global geography. Travelling around the world at pace enables travellers to encounter the world through a mobile panoptic gaze that both produces and consumes difference. The constant movement of round-the-world travel produces difference by juxtaposing an array of places and rhythms within a single trip, while allowing the traveller to collect and consume those differences.

Giving Back, Doing Good, Feeling Global: The Affective Flows of Family Voluntourism:

Whereas research on volunteer tourism has tended to focus on college-aged individuals, this article focuses on families with young children who volunteer abroad together. The article engages with scholarly debates surrounding the emotional and affective dimensions of voluntourism to examine how volunteering experiences encourage children to “feel global.” Through a qualitative analysis of ethnographic stories about catharsis and comfort zones, the article illustrates how certain emotions are produced and managed in the context of family voluntourism in order to propel children toward global subjectivities. The analysis reveals that family voluntourism reflects a neoliberal logic that compels parents to prepare their children for an uncertain future by developing an emotional repertoire of adaptability, open-mindedness, compassion, and gratitude. Family voluntourism is therefore not necessarily about making a difference in poor communities, but rather about equipping middle-class children from the Global North with the emotional skills they will need to live in the uncertain and unequal world of neoliberal globalization.Whereas research on volunteer tourism has tended to focus on college-aged individuals, this article focuses on families with young children who volunteer abroad together. The article engages with s...

Making a difference together: discourses of transformation in family voluntourism

AbstractThis article explores the intersection of development discourse, volunteer tourism, and practices of family travel. While research on the emerging trend of voluntourism has tended to focus on young, single, college-aged volunteers, little attention has been paid to families with young children who volunteer abroad. Taking as its starting point the prevalent message that voluntourism can “make a difference”, the article examines the implications of emphasizing the family and the child, rather than structural inequalities, as the objects of transformation. Based on face-to-face and online interactions with worldschooling families, the article uses mobile virtual ethnography to create an in-depth and immersive study of mobile and online social groups. Findings suggest that families undertake voluntourism as a strategy for fostering family bonding and cultivating their childrens sense of global citizenship. In both cases, family voluntourism pursues transformation in the private sphere of the family ...Abstract This article explores the intersection of development discourse, volunteer tourism, and practices of family travel. While research on the emerging trend of voluntourism has tended to focus on young, single, college-aged volunteers, little attention has been paid to families with young children who volunteer abroad. Taking as its starting point the prevalent message that voluntourism can “make a difference”, the article examines the implications of emphasizing the family and the child, rather than structural inequalities, as the objects of transformation. Based on face-to-face and online interactions with worldschooling families, the article uses mobile virtual ethnography to create an in-depth and immersive study of mobile and online social groups. Findings suggest that families undertake voluntourism as a strategy for fostering family bonding and cultivating their childrens sense of global citizenship. In both cases, family voluntourism pursues transformation in the private sphere of the family rather than in the public sphere of political activism. In this sense, discourses of transformation make family voluntourism complicit with neoliberal ideals of individual responsibility and entrepreneurialism that may reinforce rather than dismantle entrenched Global North/Global South power hierarchies, but they also lend themselves to critical debates that may recuperate the transformative potential of volunteer tourism.

Introduction: Alternative Tourism Ontologies

We are expecting guests so we are cleaning our house — even though we very well know that after our guests leave, the house will likely be even messier than it was before. What is the point then? Is all the trouble for nothing? No. If the house was too dirty our guests would not be able to enjoy themselves, no matter how good the talk, the food, the coffee or the wine. Or, even worse, if they knew our house was always a mess, they would stay away. No one would come. Indeed, should we ever want to sell our home we would take the deep cleanse even further: we would hide photographs, piles of paper, pieces of clothing — all belongings that are too personal — in the cupboards, in the attic or in the cellar. In that case, we would make our home into a blank screen onto which potential buyers could project future scenarios of themselves hosting their own guests in this space. For now, however, we tidy up just enough to make our guests feel welcome, but not so much as to erase every trace of ourselves.