Circular Oikonomia, Posthumanism and Local Space to Socialise Tourism

The rapid growth of tourism and global mobility before the COVID-19 outbreak and the global crisis experienced afterwards have been challenging the perception of the global and local context within which we live and travel. In Down to Earth: Politics in the new climate regime (2018) and After Lockdown: A metamorphosis (2021a), Bruno Latour stresses how this historical time urges us to adopt a novel perspective on the enmeshed environmental and socio-economic crisis. For him, this means adopting the “down to earth” perspective of terrestrials entangled with other terrestrials, all belonging to a flattened topography in which the dimensions of global and local are merged. Such an approach contrasts with the “out of this world” perspective that has been allowing exploitative approaches both to nature and to human and non-human beings (Latour, 2018).

The pandemic crisis therefore appears as a warning and, as such, also as an opportunity for a change of perspective over the space within which we live and travel, since “all the resources of sciences, humanities, and arts, will have to be mobilised once again to shift attention to our shared terrestrial condition” (Latour, 2021b).

Within this context, our study explores how the COVID-19 global crisis - together with its uneven social justice, unbalanced power-relations and global-local (im)mobilities - prompts us to rethink the space inside and outside tourism. It does so by investigating the active role that the local space can play to “socialise tourism”, by re-centring it within the society and re-orienting it towards the environmental and social needs and well-being of the local dimension and its dwellers (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2020; Higgins-Desbiolles et al., 2022; Higgins-Desbiolles & Bigby, 2021; Tomassini & Cavagnaro, 2020).