Representing pace in tourism mobilities: staycations, Slow Travel and The Amazing Race

Abstract

This article examines the way popular representations of tourism make sense of pace within the context of Western modernity and asks how certain ethical and ideological values come to be associated with speed, slowness or stillness. In the typical story of modernity, speed is commonly associated with positive values such as ‘freedom’ and ‘progress’, while slowness and stillness are often seen as marginal or undesirable modes of mobility. The analysis presented suggests that paying attention to pace and the way pace is socially encoded in media contexts reveals a more complicated narrative of mobility and modernity. The article draws on an analysis of media representations of three popular modes of tourism – the ‘staycation’, a neologism invented to describe vacationing at home; Slow Travel; an emerging social movement that advocates travelling slowly and locally; and the television programme The Amazing Race – to argue that the way pace is socially encoded in these representations is central not only to a more nuanced story of modernity, but also to a ‘politics of mobility’.