Agenda

27 Nov 2025 11:00

Cruising A Disputed Sea: The Geopolitics of Tourism in the South China Sea

Online lecture series

Yan Huang (South China Normal University)
Cruising a disputed sea: The geopolitics of tourism in the South China Sea

Tourism on disputed islands and waters in the South China Sea (SCS) constitutes and reflects the coastal states’ maritime territorialisation efforts. This presentation focuses on tourism geopolitics in the disputed SCS and uses tourism as a method to unpack the multi-scalar geopolitical dynamics in the region. It reveals that China’s tourism in the SCS is far from a cohesive, state-led, top-down strategy aimed solely at maritime territorialisation. Instead, a diverse constellation of subnational and nonstate players shapes and intervenes in tourism territorial politics. Developing the notion of territorial socialisation to illustrate tourists’ internalisation of state territoriality, it shows that the Chinese tourists are pragmatic, calculative geopolitical actors. Their geopolitical experiences through tourism are connected to, and embedded in, the broad geopolitical realities of China’s rising and unjust international orders, while informed by official territorial rhetoric and traditional political culture. Given tourism’s increasingly important role in everyday contexts to affect individuals’ ‘territorial socialisation, I argue that tourism is a mundane and intimate way in which people regularly live geopolitics.

Yan Huang is a lecturer in the School of Geography at South China Normal University, Guangzhou. Yan earned her PhD at Griffith University, Australia. She is a political geographer focusing on tourism geopolitics and maritime geopolitics in the South China Sea. She has led the conceptual development of territorial socialisation and introduced tourism as a method to the analysis of multi-scalar geopolitical affairs. Her works have been published in Political Geography, Geopolitics, Tourism Geographies, Australian Geographer, among others.

This event is part of the Online Lecture Series Ways of State-Building in Contemporary China, organised by Michela Bonato (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) and Giulia Cabras (Freie Universität Berlin); scientific referee: Prof. Luiza Anna Bialasiewicz (Ca' Foscari University of Venice).

Lingua

L'evento si terrà in inglese

Organizzatore

Centro SELISI, Department of Economics, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Freie Universität Berlin, and co-funded by the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions - Project 101106116 — IMAT (In)visibility of Multilingualism in Amdo Tibet

Link

http://urly.it/31cj_t

Allegati

Locandina 2623 KB
Programma generale ciclo incontri 2583 KB

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