Geopolitics of mobile masses: refugee and tourist metaphors in Finnish-Russian bordertown media
Vainikka, Vilhelmiina; Vainikka, Joni Tuomas; Prokkola, Eeva-Kaisa (2024-03-13)
Taylor & Francis
13.03.2024
Vainikka, V., Vainikka, J. T., & Prokkola, E. K. (2024). Geopolitics of mobile masses: refugee and tourist metaphors in Finnish-Russian bordertown media. Tourism Geographies, 26(5), 735–754. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2328608
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the accepted manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the accepted manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-202406114354
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-202406114354
Tiivistelmä
Abstract
This paper examines the discourses on mobile others as objects of massification or likened to natural forces. By creating a dialogue between theories of crowds/masses and popular geopolitics, we examine how a local media frames the actual, imagined and absent border crossings of refugees and tourists when a voluminous mobile group disappears in tandem with an emerging unease about a new mobile group. We focus on the freesheet Imatralainen, published in a South Karelian Finnish-Russian bordertown that has been a tourist destination since the late eighteenth century but where invisible geopolitical tension is part of everyday life. Our discourse analysis shows that from the Crimean crisis to the migrant ‘crisis’ (2014–2016), local media have frequently portrayed Russian tourists and non-European migrants via a natural force rhetoric while viewing both refugees and tourists as potential resources or burdens. The mobility of others can represent itself as an external threat, and it can be taken as a perspectival threatscape that opens space for geopolitical issues amplified or transformed through the idea of masses and crowds into potential local issues. The article contributes to tourism geographies and the geopolitics of mobilities literature by evaluating the potential of classical crowd theories for understanding how threatscapes relating to the refugee-tourist nexus are made and manipulated by linguistic collectivisation, silencing and dehumanisation. We argue that more attention should be given to the role of the local in shaping the popular geopolitics of mobilities that construct, sustain and fabricate discourses of ‘otherness’ and massification.
This paper examines the discourses on mobile others as objects of massification or likened to natural forces. By creating a dialogue between theories of crowds/masses and popular geopolitics, we examine how a local media frames the actual, imagined and absent border crossings of refugees and tourists when a voluminous mobile group disappears in tandem with an emerging unease about a new mobile group. We focus on the freesheet Imatralainen, published in a South Karelian Finnish-Russian bordertown that has been a tourist destination since the late eighteenth century but where invisible geopolitical tension is part of everyday life. Our discourse analysis shows that from the Crimean crisis to the migrant ‘crisis’ (2014–2016), local media have frequently portrayed Russian tourists and non-European migrants via a natural force rhetoric while viewing both refugees and tourists as potential resources or burdens. The mobility of others can represent itself as an external threat, and it can be taken as a perspectival threatscape that opens space for geopolitical issues amplified or transformed through the idea of masses and crowds into potential local issues. The article contributes to tourism geographies and the geopolitics of mobilities literature by evaluating the potential of classical crowd theories for understanding how threatscapes relating to the refugee-tourist nexus are made and manipulated by linguistic collectivisation, silencing and dehumanisation. We argue that more attention should be given to the role of the local in shaping the popular geopolitics of mobilities that construct, sustain and fabricate discourses of ‘otherness’ and massification.
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