Wikiversity:Fellow-Programm Freies Wissen/Einreichungen/“The right to tell one´s story”: Openness and digital rights in s´Arenal, Majorca.
“The right to tell one´s story”: Openness and digital rights in s´Arenal, Majorca.[Bearbeiten]The Balearic archipelago is one of the most “touristized” areas of the planet (Murray, 2015). Particularly in Mallorca, the tourist phenomenon, as documented by the documentary Overbooking (Dioscórides, 2019) shows the failure of the tourism model as a provider of social justice and equity. Two data are very relevant. Only 2% of the energy used in the tourism sector is renewable, that is, the danger to the environment is constantly increasing. On the other hand, despite receiving more and more visitors in the last decade (13.6 million in 2019), the income per capita in Mallorca fell from first to seventh place in the last decade. Additionally, The Balearic Archipelago tops the school failure and imported product lists. This situation and the economic monoculture, only relied on Tourism, have brought social polarization and transnational tension. But this is not reduced to The Balearic archipelago. It makes sense in a context of uneven economic development between North and South Europe. A sign of this is the recent creation of the Network of Cities and Regions of Southern Europe facing “Turistización” (2018). Reduction of the right to housing as a result of real estate speculation after the financial crisis of 2008/2012, poor local trade, mass use of public places, saturation of the public transport network, job insecurity and increased pollution, are some of the problems that said network try to address. Some scholars have termed it “tourismphobia” (Milano, 2017), but how do people really live in a highly touristized place? What relationships are established when the proximity of the “Other” - tourists, outsiders, visitors - exceeds the limits of the tolerable? What unheard-of, little-observed or documented solidarity is built between those who seek to tell a different story from apparent reality? What reconfigurations operate in the notion of territory? With these concerns in mind, I built my initial research project within the framework of the Doctoral Studies in Ethnology at Heidelberg University, and carried out field work in s´Arenal, Majorca during the year 2019, a highly “touristized” place, affected by the so-called drunk tourism and known by German youth as Ballermann. S´Arenal -also known as Playa de Palma- represents a transnational tension between at least two ways of experience the leisure time. Hence, two radically contrasting ways of experience territory whose interaction is limited by the tourist infrastructure itself. Using ethnographic method and participant observation, I came into contact with both social identities, German tourists and Majorcans, and collected data - interviews, audio files, photographic archive - with the aim of understanding the way in which these two territories interact and come into tension in the same place, the discourses that emanate from these practices and the stories that remain hidden in said phenomenon. Based on the material collected in the field work and following the pertinent notes of Murillo's on “parameters (and constraints) for ethnographic data management” (2018) from the perspective of “Open Antro Source”, my contribution to the Fellow Program Freies Wissen is the production of a Podcast that performs, using the collaborative ethnography, “an alternative and historical account of s´Arenal”, in words of one of my informant. From this perspective, digital rights and the notion of „openness“ advocated by Mark Graham (2018), this material would seek that subjects can give a name to something that has physically ceased to exist due to tourism development, but that constitutes the texture of their culture. Thus, the ethnographic account, in exploration with the resources offered by digital technologies, constitutes another form of "tell one´s story". == hier die Beschreibung des Forschungsprojektes eintragen Autor/in[Bearbeiten]
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