Underwater Hotels

Phillip Vannini is a professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC, Canada. April Vannini is a community-engaged learning coordinator at the University of Victoria and teaches in the School of Communication and Culture at Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC, Canada.

"Do take the plunge with the Vannini–adventurer-scholars bar none–as they chart a whole new science – amphibious sensory geography, leaving terrestrial social science behind. Feel your senses pressurized and rearranged, experience what it is to be ‘animal’ at sea, and encounter wonder full aquatic ambiances and architectures. Immerse yourself in this book and discover all that is missing from our commonsense understanding of life on earth. The odyssey so evocatively described in its pages makes uncommon sense."David Howes, Concordia University, Canada"While reading the book I kept asking myself, what will be the consequences of humans taking over new spaces such as the sea? The book illustrates so vividly that this is not a question for the future, but for here and now. We are not harvesting seas just for food and power, but increasingly for new experiences, consumption, and spaces for dwelling. Through their compelling post-qualitative research, Phillip and April show us how imaginative research can be about “taking part in the world’s ongoing formation of itself and in giving back a little”. What this book gives back is hope – hope that we can learn other ways to inhabit our common planet. Engaging in the truly compelling stories of the returned gazes from Rufus, Julius and other fish in this book is essential reading for all scholars participating in imagining future tourism worlds."Outi Rantala, University of Lapland, Finland"This book offers a deeply fascinating, rich, and lively nonrepresentational, sensory ethnographic dive into the strange geographies of underwater hotels. It is highly original and bears the distinct traits of the Vannini couple, an intellectual, productive, and ever-curious pair. Their engaging and thought-provoking ethnographic accounts, sensory impressions, and theoretical developments come together like a beautiful, gentle wave of people, sea creatures, designs, and imaginations. This is a rare treat, and I highly recommend curious ethnographers, cultural geographers, and tourism scholars to dive into it."Jonas Larsen, Roskilde University, Denmark"If Planetary Spaces as a series was designed to think on “socio-cultural, economic and/or political entanglements” with ‘earthly’ but also ‘more-than-earthly’ environments, ‘Underwater Hotels’ fits perfectly, taking the reader under the surface of the sea, merging geography and tourism studies together with a literal deep ethnography to critically analyse these newly emergent planetary spaces in a world – as the series seeks to address - “of uncertainty, flux and transformation”. Enlivening the imagination, speaking to (elite) futures, exploring human and more-than-human connectivity, and addressing how to exist in challenging physical ‘terrains’, this book – by the leading scholars of cutting-edge, ethnographically-driven, theoretically-informed research on inhabiting and moving through our world and its planetary conditions – offers an insightful view at a critical time, where the planetary limits are up for question in profound new ways."Kimberley Peters, Series Editor, Planetary Spaces Series

• 1. Introduction 2. Equarius Hotel: From heterotopia to alloútopia Intermezzo I: Lively commodities 3. Imaginative sensory ethnography 4. The Manta Resort's Underwater Room: Care and ethics in more-than-human tourism Intermezzo II: White Lotus 5. The Muraka: Sea life, more-than-human architecture, and alloútopic imagination Intermezzo III: Less-than-data 6. Jules' Undersea Lodge: On the im possibility of human life underwater 7. Reefsuites: The tourist gaze and beyond 8. But how did you sleep? (Dis- )comfort and the animal gaze 9. Afterword