124266 KO Critical Media Analysis (2015S)

Guidebooks and travel blogs celebrate touristic freedom and offer us colourful insights into destinations from all around the world. As powerful bodies of knowledge, they shape our ways of understanding foreign cultures and help us make sense of the world as we browse their pages, online and offline alike. To that effect, particular itineraries and ways of seeing people from other cultures are culturally legitimized as appropriate, whereas other practices are often excluded. However, guidebooks and blogs also embrace an ethical vision of humanity that assumes travel as one key to reducing cultural differences and making the world more accessible. This accessibility is not available to everybody though and western tourist practices often continue to be embedded in the signifying economy of a post-colonial capitalist enterprise. This course takes this as a point of departure and investigates how images of alterity are negotiated by these sources and how notions of freedom and responsibility are played out.