Privileged Mobilities and in/Voluntary Travel

In recent years, I have been an active member of two distinct scholarly networks/associations. One focuses on refugee/migration: The Critical Refugee Studies Network Canada, and the second focuses on tourism: Critical tourism Studies Association. These affiliations have led to my participation in numerous workshops and conferences in which I have consistently noted remarkable overlaps in the two fields. For example, as critical projects, the fields of Critical Tourism Studies and Critical Refugee Studies share the fundamental objectives of examining border controls and how governmental power normalizes geographic mobility for some while restricting the movement of others. They also share many conceptual and political concerns about how race, gender, class, and citizenship are shaped and reflected in governmental processes and practices of political economies and nationalisms. Yet, those who work in refugee/migration studies and those who work on tourism rarely ‘speak’ to each other.

This paper seeks to bring together these distinct and seemingly disparate critical fields of inquiry and to highlight how they inform each other under the broader rubric of “privileged mobilities.” To this end, I examine the conceptual and material links between tourists and refugees in the contemporary moment. The aim is to propose a theoretical framework for exposing the compelling similarities and crass differences between the figures of ‘the tourist’ and ‘the refugee’. It takes as its starting point the idea that tourism is a social phenomenon (as opposed to an industry) in which the access to voluntary travel is paradoxically linked to the increased policing and surveillance of borders (Torabian & Mair, 2017).