Migrant support volunteer tourism facing crises: Patchwork autoethnographies on Lesvos (Greece)

Abstract

The island of Lesvos serves as a symbol of migration in the Mediterranean. From 2015 onwards, a steady stream of volunteer tourists began working on the island. Between 2019 and 2022 various ‘crises’ such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the fire at the Moria camp, and the rise of the far right in Greece significantly altered living conditions for both refugees and volunteer workers on the island. The authors employ a comparative patchwork autoethnography to rethink participant observation to fit the pandemic era. Through a situated, relational, and more-than-representational analysis of autoethnographic material and the confrontation between the authors’ experiences, the aim of this paper is to investigate how migrant support volunteer tourism interacts with various simultaneous ‘crises’ ongoing on Lesvos. This led to a reimagining of the way we understand volunteer tourism over its ‘pro vulnerable’ approach.

Performativities, pandemic pressures and ‘patchwork’ tourism places: Editor-in-Chief notes

“…The notion of pandemic pressures, individual and place transformations and their related social practices runs through Di Matteo and Daminelli (2024) work on volunteer tourism in the Mediterranean island of Lesvos and Ren et al’s (2024) study of tour guides in China. In Di Matteo and Daminelli (2024) autoethnography, the island received a constant flow of volunteer tourists who began working on the island in 2015.…”

“…The notion of pandemic pressures, individual and place transformations and their related social practices runs through Di Matteo and Daminelli (2024) work on volunteer tourism in the Mediterranean island of Lesvos and Ren et al’s (2024) study of tour guides in China. In Di Matteo and Daminelli (2024) autoethnography, the island received a constant flow of volunteer tourists who began working on the island in 2015. Their study departs from mainstream volunteer tourism research by engaging on the complexities brought about by several crises which hit the camp between 2019 and 2022 – the COVID-19 pandemic, the fire at Moria camp and the ascendence of far-right politics and policies in Greece.…”

“…Resonating with the critical, interpretive and qualitative orientation of the journal, the metaphor of a ‘patchwork’ had also been employed, in Schiavone and Brandellero’s (2024) interrogation of the multi-mediated and multi-layered aspects of experiences of Edinburgh’s app-based film tourism and Di Matteo and Daminelli (2024) conceptualisation of their fieldwork at Lesvos’ refugee camp as a ‘comparative patchwork autoethnography’. Such ‘patchwork’ approaches signal the incompleteness of any given standpoint, the need for layers of meanings and meaning-makings and the complicated richness of our tourism worlds.…”

“…While taking place in diverse geographical regions and political-social situations from lockdown China to pre-viral Scotland, these four articles converge on at least two significant research trajectories. Two of these articles (Schiavone and Brandellero, 2024; Tham et al, 2024) are united in their examinations of film and social mediated tourism place practices while the remaining two (Di Matteo and Daminelli, 2024; Ren et al, 2024) converge on critical interrogations of worker-volunteer agencies and struggles. The notion of a ‘patchwork’ had also been employed, in two divergent localities in most of our tourism imaginations – Schiavone and Brandellero (2024) taking on the multi-mediated and multi-layered aspects of experiences to discuss Edinburgh’s app-based film tourism while Di Matteo and Daminelli (2024) conceptualised their fieldwork at Lesvos’ refugee camp as a ‘comparative patchwork autoethnography’.…”

“…Two of these articles (Schiavone and Brandellero, 2024; Tham et al, 2024) are united in their examinations of film and social mediated tourism place practices while the remaining two (Di Matteo and Daminelli, 2024; Ren et al, 2024) converge on critical interrogations of worker-volunteer agencies and struggles. The notion of a ‘patchwork’ had also been employed, in two divergent localities in most of our tourism imaginations – Schiavone and Brandellero (2024) taking on the multi-mediated and multi-layered aspects of experiences to discuss Edinburgh’s app-based film tourism while Di Matteo and Daminelli (2024) conceptualised their fieldwork at Lesvos’ refugee camp as a ‘comparative patchwork autoethnography’. We trace these convergences and diversity here and acknowledge their connections with existing corpora of work in the journal.…”