"Slums of hope" - Sanitising Silences in Trip-advisor Reviews

Here's how our speaker frames the talk:

In a context of rapidly increasing urbanisation and deepening global inequalities, slum tourism has thrived. I present the findings of a discursive analysis of tourists’ online reviews of two township tours in Cape Town. I investigate how, and to what ends, tourists collectively construct townships as places of hope on TripAdvisor; and question how these reviews feed into broader narratives of urban poverty in the global south. I argue that tourists draw on both neoliberal and colonial discourses to construct townships as places of hope–vibrant cultural spaces, rich in non-material assets, inhabited by happy, hard-working residents. I show that by producing slums as productive cultural spaces, tourists are able to resist the stigma associated with slum tourism and position themselves as ethical, enlightened and morally superior tourists. I argue that neoliberal and colonial discourses operate together to produce sanitised representations of townships that…