In February 2020 the first travel restrictions associated to COVID-19 were set up in Asia. At the end of March 2020, 100% of destinations were having travel restrictions (UNWTO, 2020). In two months, tourism went from a full fledge growing industry to a halt, what Ek and Hultman (2008, p. 224) were calling "the continuous becoming of commercialized space where experiences embedded in nexuses of mobilities are the products on offer" was discontinued as mobility, international and domestic, was highly restricted by social distancing and confinement measures. Building on Ek (2006) and Minca (2007) reading of Agamben’s (1998) Bare life concept, the research proposes an analysis of media coverage of tourism and COVID-19 through a biopolitical lens.
The purpose of the research article is to understand how tourism discourses is evolving within the public sphere when it intersects with sanitary and economic crisis. This research draws on online print media publications from six regional and international news journals, based in some of the areas initially most affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic, including: South China Morning Post (SCMP), The Asahi Shimbun, ANSA (English)*, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Globe and Mail. Ensuring each publication’s relevance to this research, articles containing the keywords ‘coronavirus’, ‘covid’, ‘virus’, ‘outbreak’ or ‘pandemic’ more than once within the title, subtitle and body of the text have been extracted in PDF format in chronological order, beginning on February 1, 2020 and ongoing, at present.
Mots clés : Biopolitics|discourses|Media
A105001DL