ELF in Responsible Tourism: Power Relationships in unequal migration encounters

This paper explores ELF misunderstandings in the domain of Responsible Tourism (a hybridization between Voluntary-Work and Place-Marketing discourses) promoted by local administrators of Italian seaside resorts negatively affected by migrant arrivals. Tourists are offered holidays in voluntary-work camps in contact with migrants and asylum seekers to enhance their ‘sympathetic understanding’ of the migration experience, thus actualizing the ‘social Utopia’ archetype of ‘the place of good and harmony’ into a more light-hearted ‘recreational Utopia’. Conversely, immigrants consider such places as a Dystopia (anti-utopia) imposing unfamiliar roles upon them, as they are indeed expected to promote tourism – hopefully in return for easier social and legal assistance. A case study shows how tourists’ and immigrants’ ELF variations are initially aimed at co-creating successful communication, but then they often turn into a ‘dystopian manipulation’ of semantic meanings (e.g., migrants’ ‘resigned desperation’ misinterpreted as ‘intimate serenity’), ultimately leading to ELF accommodation failure.