Cohort: SOMET 37° 

Topic of the thesis: Urban tourism and the production of the "other city": an analysis of guided tours in stigmatized places

Abstract: The proposed research intends to focus on the analysis of alternative - and often claimed to be sustainable - urban tourism in stigmatized places. I will analyze contemporary urban tourism by combining an ethnography of guided tours and walks with the study on the narration of the other city, in order to understand how practices and discourses interact in the co-production of place as a tourism attraction. Considering tourism is an inherently expansive economy, constantly constructing and appropriating new experiences and new places (d'Eramo 2017), I start from Goffman's metaphor of staging (1959) to understand the mechanism of continually revealing the backstage of the city that tourists want to know about. In this sense, the other city is composed of suburbs, slums and/or multicultural neighborhoods that are often victims of territorial stigma (Wacquant 2007) and represent the backstage of the city-showcase of the historical center. I will be looking at studies on slum and ethnic urban tourism to analyze tourism practices performed in stigmatized contexts, characterized by an asymmetrical distribution of resources and power between tourists and “touristed”. Moreover, tourism is one of the most significant ways in which consumption takes the spatial form and, at the same time, is a dynamic force that creates places. For those reasons, I believe that tourism practices are a privileged field of observation and thus of understanding of the urban change (Corbillé 2009). I will analyze the narratives regarding the chosen practice (or practices) and place (or places), as they have an extremely performative value both in the process of stigmatization and in that of the production of the place in a touristic sense. Alongside these discourses, I will examine ethnographically the tourism practices as they unfold, to explore the actual tourist encounter through participant observation. This proposal broads the field of research I started with the Master Thesis in which I presented an ethnographic analysis of intercultural tours held in a (nowadays partially) stigmatized Turin marketplace. I would like to extend my research to other alternative touristic practices and places in order to compare them.

Research interests: Urban studies; Tourism studies; Slum tourism; Urban ethnic tourism.

Graduated from: La Sapienza University of Rome (BA); University of Turin (MA).

Degrees obtained: BA in Sociology; MA in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnography.

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