M Mostafanezhad
Biographic Data
| ID | 34724 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Mostafanezhad |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Mostafanezhad |
| SIGNATURE | MOSTAFANEZHAD M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9819-5245 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 654 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Making air pollution legible
Air pollution is one of the most significant environmental threats to human health, causing over seven million premature deaths annually, with two‐thirds occurring in the Asia‐Pacific region. Each year, from February to April, northern Thailand experiences some of the world's worst air quality. The region's seasonal air pollution is primarily blamed on biomass burning from maize cultivation in the highlands and is perceived to have deteriorated o…
Nelson H. H. Graburn - a tribute collection
On the Verge
Accumulation by recreation
Plantation Disaster Capitalism in Maui
Maui residents are reckoning with tourism in the aftermath of the 2023 fires. Drawing from historical sources and popular media reports, we argue that beyond the island's strained relationship with the tourism industry, residents are contending with the slow emergency of plantation disaster capitalism. We draw from Naomi Klein and Kapua'ala Sproat's (2023) concept of plantation disaster capitalism which identifies the plantation industry's domina…
The new tourism geopolitics
In this introduction to the special issue, The new tourism geopolitics, we call on scholars to bridge tourism geographies and political geography through the framework of tourism geopolitics. The issue offers novel conceptualizations that extend beyond the study of material borders, passports, and nation-state discourses. Rather, the authors of this issue home in on the entanglements between tourism and geopolitics in the form of events, everyday…
"Remembering "Hosts and Guests
Particulate Matters
Air pollution now affects 92 percent of the global population and is responsible for one out of nine deaths, nearly two thirds of which occur in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. Emerging work on the political ecology of air pollution examines how its noxious effects are unevenly distributed across social categories such as race and class. Geographers know much less about the social mechanisms through which air pollution and its risks and m…
Becoming a Crisis
Chiang Mai, Thailand, has long experienced seasonal air pollution episodes at the end of the dry season (February–April). While the severity and length of the episodes vary annually, popular narratives describe how the “haze crisis” is worsening. In this article, we address the role of the media in driving the growing awareness of seasonal air pollution in Chiang Mai. The article contributes to scholarship on the politics of the representation of…
Human Dimensions of Air Quality
Poor ambient air quality is one of today’s greatest environmental health risks. However, unlike water, wildland fire, or wildlife, comparatively less human dimensions scholarship has focused on air resources. The papers in this special issue highlight how people across varying cultures, geographies, and identities create and relate to varying air quality conditions. In doing so, the issue challenges dominant perspectives of air pollution as a pur…
A case for popular geoeconomics
Picking up where Mallin and Sidaway (2023) left off, this commentary makes a case for popular geoeconomics—as well as geoeconomics beyond the Beltway. We address the dialectical tension between geoeconomics and geopolitics as it is demonstrated through popular and geo‐dispersed renderings of the concept. Geoeconomic visionaries drive geopolitical relations not only by revaluing land, labour and resources across space but through their everyday en…
Sovereign anxiety in Myanmar
Geographers have increasingly attended to the role of emotion in geopolitical encounters and the geopolitics of cross‐border infrastructure projects. While scholars have theorised fear as an emotion produced by elite geopolitical discourses and encounters between bodies, we know much less about how infrastructure's materialities provoke fear and anxiety. Furthermore, key distinctions between anxiety – or a psychological state of insecurity and un…
Cultural ecosystem services and placemaking in peripheral areas
Surplus precaritization
The Thai-Myanmar border represents one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world, while the Myanmar-Bangladesh border is now home to nearly one million displaced Rohingya, making it the world's most populated refugee camp. During the period of “democratic transition,” pre-emptively terminated by the February 2021 military coup, foreign direct investment continued to flow into Myanmar despite ongoing humanitarian crises. Rather t…
Global tourism in crisis
Purpose The aims of this Editorial are twofold: (i) synthesise emergent themes from the special issue (ii) tender four theoretical frameworks toward examination of crises in tourism. Design/methodology/approach The thematic analysis of papers highlights a diversity of COVID-19 related crises contexts and research approaches. The need for robust theoretical interventions is highlighted through the four proposed conceptual frameworks. Findings Cris…
Territorialization on tour
Violent atmospheres
(Post-) pandemic tourism resiliency
While tourism scholars have sought to problematize the unevenly distributed impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, we know much less about how resilience is cultivated among tourism practitioners and communities whose lives and livelihoods are have been placed in limbo. Drawing on literature at the intersection of critical tourism studies and resilience theory as well as interviews with local tourism practitioners and academics, four historically situ…
Tourism geographies in the 'Asian Century
From the British Century of the 1800s to the American Century of the 1900s to the contemporary Asian Century, tourism geographies are deeply entangled in broader shifts in geopolitical power (Luce, 1999; Scott, 2008; Shenkar, 2006). This paper considers what the transition into the Asian Century means for some of the most urgent issues of our time such as sustainable development, human rights, gender equality, and environmental change. We critiqu…
The materiality of air pollution
Between February and April of each year, air pollution blankets much of northern Thailand and severely impacts the livelihoods of tourism practitioners and farmers in the region. Environmental narratives among lowland, urban residents attribute haze to biomass burning among highland farmers. Highland farmers, however, contend that environmental governance regimes have lengthened and exacerbated what is now regarded as the annually recurring haze …
Becoming a New Farmer
A resurgence of agrarianism has motivated new farmers to enter farming, not for profit, but for lifestyle and socio-ecological values which are frequently associated with diverse economies. Proponents of diverse economies argue for an ontological reframing that accounts for non-capitalist forms of economic exchange. However, these perspectives have not fully addressed the conditions-often structured by race and class-that facilitate participation…
Geopolitical anxieties of tourism
Bringing the political geography of tourism to bear on responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, this commentary reveals how the geopolitical anxieties of tourism are mediated by historical geographies of race as well as contemporary geoeconomic relations and the broader pivot to the Asia-Pacific region
Chronopolitics of crisis
Reflections and discussions
The large number of commentaries in this special issue reflect the need that so many people have to express themselves as a way of releasing the anxieties and integrating the hopes that the COVID-19 pandemic has engendered in individuals and groups around the world. The guest editors of this special issue provide the following comments in reflecting on the major themes that are envisioned for travel and tourism in a COVID-19 world. Comments from …
Covid-19 is an unnatural disaster
The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic has closed borders, grounded planes, quarantined more than half of the world's population, triggered anxiety en masse, and shaken global capitalism to its core. Scholars of the political ecology of disasters have sought to denaturalize so-called "natural" disasters by demonstrating their uneven consequences. Work in the political ecology of health similarly accounts for how risk of illness and disease are socio-eco…
The Geography of Compassion in Volunteer Tourism
Volunteer tourism is at the center of new concerns over the ethical consumption of tourism experiences. As one link in a broader chain of expansion of neoliberal moral economies in the West, volunteer tourism participants coproduce a ‘geography of compassion’ that maps onto the ‘Third World’ and the children who live there. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I examine the widespread sentiment that Thailand is …
Getting in Touch with your Inner Angelina
Reporting on the growth of volunteer tourism, a recent Time magazine article explains, 'Getting in touch with your inner Angelina Jolie is easier than it used to be!'. In myriad ways celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Madonna have made international volunteering sexy. These women and their adopted children from the so-called 'Third World' have come to symbolise popular humanitarianism in the West. This paper addresses the cultural politics of fe…
Volunteer tourism and the popular humanitarian gaze
Geopolitical encounters of tourism
The geopolitical turn in tourism geographies
Tourism is one of the most far-reaching geopolitical practices of the twenty-first century. With more than one billion tourists crossing national borders annually, tourism is a critical site of eve
Traveling for a cause
Over the last decade there has been a rise in ‘volunteer tourism’ or ‘voluntourism,’ which is characterized by the combination of travel and volunteering, typically in social or economic development or conversation oriented projects. The papers in this special issue theoretically and empirically examine the dynamic interplay between volunteer tourism and the broader expansion of market-mediated social justice campaigns. Also examined is the poten…
Lost in Thailand
The recent blockbuster hit 'Lost in Thailand' had more than USD $200 million in ticket sales in China in 2012, and quickly became the nation's highest-grossing homegrown film ever. Set in northern Thailand, the film has since contributed to the prodigious growth of Chinese tourism in the region. Among other experiences, film-induced tourism in northern Thailand includes the re-enactment of scenes from the film on university campuses, in temples a…
The political economy of orphanage tourism in Cambodia
A recent Aljazeera report on ‘Cambodia’s Orphan Business’ explains ‘how “voluntourism” could be fuelling the exploitation of Cambodian children’. Anti-orphanage tourism movements have emerged to resist the growth of Cambodia’s contested orphanage tourism industry, which is blamed for widespread corruption and the exploitation of children for profit. Taking a Polanyian political economy approach, this article illustrates how the emergence of and r…
The Politics of Aesthetics in Volunteer Tourism
Towards a geopolitics of tourism
Covid-19 is an unnatural disaster
The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic has closed borders, grounded planes, quarantined more than half of the world's population, triggered anxiety en masse, and shaken global capitalism to its core. Scholars of the political ecology of disasters have sought to denaturalize so-called "natural" disasters by demonstrating their uneven consequences. Work in the political ecology of health similarly accounts for how risk of illness and disease are socio-eco…
Tourism frontiers
One of the first industries developed in frontier regions, tourism opens new land and commodity frontiers through practices of primitive accumulation that can radically disrupt the reproduction of social relations of production. However, very little work explicitly addresses the role of tourism in frontier‐making practices. This paper brings political economy and critical geopolitics to bear on the role of tourism in the development of new land a…
Moral assemblages of volunteer tourism development in Cusco, Peru
In this paper, we develop a conceptual approach from which to examine the moral landscape of volunteer tourism development in Cusco, Peru. Drawing from recent work on assemblage theory in geography and tourism studies, we explore how assemblage thinking can facilitate new understandings of volunteer tourism development. Using assemblage as an analytical framework allows us to understand volunteer tourism as a series of relational, processual, une…
Territorialization on tour
Celebrity humanitarianism and the popular geopolitics of hope along the Thai-Burma border
Violent atmospheres
Reflections and discussions
The large number of commentaries in this special issue reflect the need that so many people have to express themselves as a way of releasing the anxieties and integrating the hopes that the COVID-19 pandemic has engendered in individuals and groups around the world. The guest editors of this special issue provide the following comments in reflecting on the major themes that are envisioned for travel and tourism in a COVID-19 world. Comments from …
The materiality of air pollution
Between February and April of each year, air pollution blankets much of northern Thailand and severely impacts the livelihoods of tourism practitioners and farmers in the region. Environmental narratives among lowland, urban residents attribute haze to biomass burning among highland farmers. Highland farmers, however, contend that environmental governance regimes have lengthened and exacerbated what is now regarded as the annually recurring haze …
Becoming a New Farmer
A resurgence of agrarianism has motivated new farmers to enter farming, not for profit, but for lifestyle and socio-ecological values which are frequently associated with diverse economies. Proponents of diverse economies argue for an ontological reframing that accounts for non-capitalist forms of economic exchange. However, these perspectives have not fully addressed the conditions-often structured by race and class-that facilitate participation…
Geopolitical anxieties of tourism
Bringing the political geography of tourism to bear on responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, this commentary reveals how the geopolitical anxieties of tourism are mediated by historical geographies of race as well as contemporary geoeconomic relations and the broader pivot to the Asia-Pacific region
(Post-) pandemic tourism resiliency
While tourism scholars have sought to problematize the unevenly distributed impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, we know much less about how resilience is cultivated among tourism practitioners and communities whose lives and livelihoods are have been placed in limbo. Drawing on literature at the intersection of critical tourism studies and resilience theory as well as interviews with local tourism practitioners and academics, four historically situ…
Tourism geographies in the 'Asian Century
From the British Century of the 1800s to the American Century of the 1900s to the contemporary Asian Century, tourism geographies are deeply entangled in broader shifts in geopolitical power (Luce, 1999; Scott, 2008; Shenkar, 2006). This paper considers what the transition into the Asian Century means for some of the most urgent issues of our time such as sustainable development, human rights, gender equality, and environmental change. We critiqu…
A chronopolitics of tourism
The chronopolitics of exile
In this article, we foreground chronopolitics - the politics of time - to examine the ways in which the heterotemporalities of Burmese exiles living in nine "temporary shelters" along the Thai-Burma (Myanmar) border mediate one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world. The imminent repatriation of these Burmese exiles, tens of thousands of whom have been waiting for decades to be resettled to an often elusive third country or t…
Sovereign anxiety in Myanmar
Geographers have increasingly attended to the role of emotion in geopolitical encounters and the geopolitics of cross‐border infrastructure projects. While scholars have theorised fear as an emotion produced by elite geopolitical discourses and encounters between bodies, we know much less about how infrastructure's materialities provoke fear and anxiety. Furthermore, key distinctions between anxiety – or a psychological state of insecurity and un…
The Politics of Aesthetics in Volunteer Tourism
Getting in Touch with your Inner Angelina
Reporting on the growth of volunteer tourism, a recent Time magazine article explains, 'Getting in touch with your inner Angelina Jolie is easier than it used to be!'. In myriad ways celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Madonna have made international volunteering sexy. These women and their adopted children from the so-called 'Third World' have come to symbolise popular humanitarianism in the West. This paper addresses the cultural politics of fe…
The Geography of Compassion in Volunteer Tourism
Volunteer tourism is at the center of new concerns over the ethical consumption of tourism experiences. As one link in a broader chain of expansion of neoliberal moral economies in the West, volunteer tourism participants coproduce a ‘geography of compassion’ that maps onto the ‘Third World’ and the children who live there. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I examine the widespread sentiment that Thailand is …
Tourism, Visual Culture, and the State in Northern Thailand
The progressive assimilation of Highlanders into lowland Thai society is matched by the simultaneous promotion of these groups to foreign and domestic tourists for their distinctive cultures and ways of life. Highlanders is a collective term representing more than 10 ethnic minority groups living in the mountainous regions of northern Thailand. This article addresses these contradictory discourses of assimilation and distinctiveness and argues th…
The political economy of orphanage tourism in Cambodia
A recent Aljazeera report on ‘Cambodia’s Orphan Business’ explains ‘how “voluntourism” could be fuelling the exploitation of Cambodian children’. Anti-orphanage tourism movements have emerged to resist the growth of Cambodia’s contested orphanage tourism industry, which is blamed for widespread corruption and the exploitation of children for profit. Taking a Polanyian political economy approach, this article illustrates how the emergence of and r…
Volunteer tourism and the popular humanitarian gaze
Traveling for a cause
Over the last decade there has been a rise in ‘volunteer tourism’ or ‘voluntourism,’ which is characterized by the combination of travel and volunteering, typically in social or economic development or conversation oriented projects. The papers in this special issue theoretically and empirically examine the dynamic interplay between volunteer tourism and the broader expansion of market-mediated social justice campaigns. Also examined is the poten…
Will Weed for Food”
Towards a geopolitics of tourism
A chronopolitics of tourism
The chronopolitics of exile
In this article, we foreground chronopolitics - the politics of time - to examine the ways in which the heterotemporalities of Burmese exiles living in nine "temporary shelters" along the Thai-Burma (Myanmar) border mediate one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world. The imminent repatriation of these Burmese exiles, tens of thousands of whom have been waiting for decades to be resettled to an often elusive third country or t…
Moral assemblages of volunteer tourism development in Cusco, Peru
In this paper, we develop a conceptual approach from which to examine the moral landscape of volunteer tourism development in Cusco, Peru. Drawing from recent work on assemblage theory in geography and tourism studies, we explore how assemblage thinking can facilitate new understandings of volunteer tourism development. Using assemblage as an analytical framework allows us to understand volunteer tourism as a series of relational, processual, une…
Celebrity humanitarianism and the popular geopolitics of hope along the Thai-Burma border
Journeys from the east
Over the past five years the number of outbound travellers from the People's Republic of China (PRC) doubled, making Chinese tourists the largest group of international travellers in the world. Drawing on media reports of the impact of box office hits on Chinese outbound tourism, we explore how popular cinema informs the Chinese tourism boom's impact on the everyday geopolitics of Sino-host tourism encounters. Through a critical discourse analysi…
Poor children on Tinder’ and their Barbie Saviours
Barbie Saviours is a satirical Instagram account and linked Facebook page that depict white western Barbies volunteering in Africa with the bio, ‘Jesus. Adventures. Africa. Two worlds. One love. Babies. Beauty. Not qualified. Called. 20 years old. It’s not about me... but it kind of is’. Drawing on emerging theories of feminist political economy, we address the growing backlash against volunteer tourism in the popular media and argue that critiqu…
Tourism in the post-selfie era
Is farming sexy? Agro-food initiatives and the contested value of agriculture in post-plantation Hawai‘i
The geopolitical turn in tourism geographies
Tourism is one of the most far-reaching geopolitical practices of the twenty-first century. With more than one billion tourists crossing national borders annually, tourism is a critical site of eve
Lost in Thailand
The recent blockbuster hit 'Lost in Thailand' had more than USD $200 million in ticket sales in China in 2012, and quickly became the nation's highest-grossing homegrown film ever. Set in northern Thailand, the film has since contributed to the prodigious growth of Chinese tourism in the region. Among other experiences, film-induced tourism in northern Thailand includes the re-enactment of scenes from the film on university campuses, in temples a…
La pollution de l’air en Thaïlande du Nord
Durant la saison sèche, entre février et avril, un épais nuage de pollution recouvre une grande partie de l’Asie du Sud et du Sud-Est, provoquant de nombreux problèmes sanitaires (maladies respiratoires) et économiques (baisse de la fréquentation touristique, perturbation du trafic aérien). Contrairement aux aspects physico-chimiques et biophysiques (absence de précipitations en saison sèche, inversion des températures, combustion de biomasse not…
Geopolitical encounters of tourism
Tourism frontiers
One of the first industries developed in frontier regions, tourism opens new land and commodity frontiers through practices of primitive accumulation that can radically disrupt the reproduction of social relations of production. However, very little work explicitly addresses the role of tourism in frontier‐making practices. This paper brings political economy and critical geopolitics to bear on the role of tourism in the development of new land a…
The anthropocenic imaginary
The Anthropocene is fundamentally a social imaginary that is both shaped by and is reshaping tourism practice. In this article, we enroll the concept of the anthropocenic imaginary to describe how the Anthropocene is symbolically and materially produced as well as the ways in which it draws on the historical separation of Humanity and Nature. As the structural roots from which the anthropocenic imaginary has grown, this binary co-produces new and…
Geopolitical anxieties of tourism
Bringing the political geography of tourism to bear on responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, this commentary reveals how the geopolitical anxieties of tourism are mediated by historical geographies of race as well as contemporary geoeconomic relations and the broader pivot to the Asia-Pacific region
Chronopolitics of crisis
Political science (41 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Politics (32 works) · Tourism (31 works) · Geography (25 works) · Law (24 works) · Law (23 works) · Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research (20 works) · Geopolitics (16 works) · Tourism, Volunteerism, and Development (16 works)