Tourism and refugee-crisis intersections: co-creating tour guide experiences in Leeds, England

Abstract

Forcibly displaced people like refugees and asylum-seekers can be socio-culturally integrated in receiving societies through tourism. Our poststructuralist approach to ethics explains this potential as we combine three concepts: Zygmunt Bauman’s “strangerhood”, Emmanuel Levinas’ “ethical responsibility”, and Jacques Derrida’s “hostipitality”. We draw on the initiative of a social enterprise in the English city of Leeds which encourages displaced people to contribute as tour-guides. During 2017 and 2019 we conducted in-depth individual and focus-group interviews with refugees, asylum-seekers, and public sector stakeholders to examine integration of displaced people via tourism. Findings highlight that contributing to the tourism sector, individual refugees and asylum-seekers are provided with a meaningful platform for self-representation moving beyond tokenistic notions of participation, and become co-creators of diverse and inclusive societies.