Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
This seminar will explore the cluster of activities and values upheld by two distinct groups inhabiting the Games’ polycrisis ecologies — the homegenisers and the foragers. Both exercise the right to mobility, but each pursues divergent agendas: homegenisers mobilise against the Olympic project, reclaiming urban space through protest and critique, while simultaneously re‑territorialising the city as a contested “home”; foragers improvise, resist, or re‑signify urban spaces through everyday practices of leisure, survival, and alternative pleasures.
The introduction of these terms is not a decorative adjustment but a conceptual intervention into how mega‑events are embedded in overlapping crises of health, environment, and governance. Drawing on agential realism, speculative realism, and actor‑network theory, while engaging established sociological frameworks (Simmel, Bauman), Rodanthi argues that Tokyo 2020 exemplifies how mega‑event mobilities blur the boundaries between travel‑leisure, protest, and activist performance. The analysis invites us to rethink whether rights to movement and pleasures of mobility form continuums with conventional activist motifs, styles, and performances, or whether they constitute new, hybrid repertoires of urban citizenship under conditions of global crisis.
Events, Tourism and Hospitality at Leeds Beckett University host an ‘open’ research seminar series each year covering recent advances within the field. We have attracted speakers from universities across the globe to debate issues which affect the events, tourism and hospitality sector.
Photo credit:"Tokyo 2020 Olympics Cauldron" by Dick Thomas Johnson is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Rodanthi Tzanelli is Professor of Sociology of Culture at the University of Leeds. Her research spans tourism, mobilities, digital design, visual and atmospheric studies, and globalisation, with a particular focus on imaginaries of the future and the role of mega events in polycrisis ecologies. She has authored 18 monographs and over 300 contributions in journals, book chapters, and digital essays. Rodanthi serves on the Executive Board of ISA Research Committee 50 (International Tourism), where she coordinates communications and contributes to international scholarly exchange. She is also a member of the chief co-editor of Hospitality & Society and acts as Critical Reviews Editor for Tourism, Culture & Communication.
