TOURISTS POTENTIAL TO LEGITIMIZE FAVELAS’ COGNITIVE CAPITAL: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Keywords: Favela Tourism, Critical Discourse Analysis, Power Relations, Legitimization
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 58

Abstract

We live in times of social, cultural, and economic changes. Knowledge and culture-based products lie at the core of the capital gear, and cities are the main exchange scenario. Tourism mobilities are deeply enmeshed in these global and neo-liberal processes. In this context, any practice of everyday life can become a tourist commodity, and tourists are suitable consumers for all kinds of cultural products, whether these come from legitimized cultural producers or not.

Urban informality fell into the extensive catalog of alternative -and urban- tourist attractions at the beginning of the 1990s in several cities in the Global South. Slum tourism is an extensively researched practice that intertwined a multiplicity of actors: people, institutions, policies, places, cultural elements, businesses, events, and so forth. It is highly controversial due to the moral dilemmas drawn by the asymmetries between hosts and guests and contested power relations.

This study bases on the potential of tourists' practices to legitimize slums' cognitive capital. We develop the case of the tourist favela Santa Marta in Rio de Janeiro. The empirical study applies critical discourse analysis methods with a Foucauldian approach. The aim is to explore the genealogy of key actors' discourses and determining whether tourism practices may potentially drive social and behavioral change by legitimizing favelas' cognitive capital. We sought to examine which cognitive favela products are valued and how they become objects of legitimation through institutional practices.