Master Thesis: Exploring the Tourism-Refugee Nexus: From Global Mobility to Local Immobility (original) (raw)

This thesis uses constructivist grounded theory, including field research and interviews, to posit a new theory of mobility as seen in the tourist-refugee nexus in Europe in 2015-2016. Current encounters between those involved in involuntary mobility with few limited movement choices and those traveling for leisure criss-cross at many sites with implications for theoretical understandings of tourism. Themes uncovered include the mobile nature of mobilities and immobilities, immobility as a condition, the co-construction and negotiation of the condition of immobility, the recreation of human mobilities, intermobility effects and deficits, unmitigated paradoxical immobility, reinforcement of socio-geographic inequalities, and the unsustainable resilience of tourism. Three cases suggest various conditions and outcomes of each theme, as stakeholders from all walks of life were interviewed in three important and diverse sites to the refugee experience: Lesvos, Greece, Åre, Sweden, and Germany. The case studies demonstrate that tourism is not a solution to stresses on site from refugee movement. Instead, tourism as an industry is reconstituted through refugee mobility, but not always toward a resilient future. Sites themselves are transformed as well and this change alters tourism within spaces, often threatening that movement by different types of bodies might be considered the same as tourist movement.