Okanagan Summer Tourism Sounds

A Feminist Sonic Ethnography of Listening, Sound, and the Politics of Space

Abstract

This podcast raises the broad question of why sound matters in tourism, understood as episodic or transitory relations of co-existence and as territories, worlds, and spaces co-inhabited yet often frictious. Created as an experimental audio documentary, it offers an in-depth story and analysis of a particular time—the summer months of 2022 and 2023—and place—BC’s Central Okanagan, a popular summer tourism destination for regional and local tourists and recreationalists. Using feminist ethnographic research methodologies, which included interviews with residents and tourists and audio recordings in/of tourism spaces oriented around Okanagan Lake, the voices of two racialized women are featured as an intervention against the dominant whiteness in tourism studies and to show the importance of listening positionalities for understanding how sound matters. Interspersed with the interlocutors’ words are montages of summer tourism sounds meant for listeners to engage with through reflexive listening. Summer Tourism Sounds is ultimately a multi-layered sonic story about racialized and gendered geographies in the Okanagan that disrupts the imagined whiteness of the region. It also provokes listeners to attune to the seasonal sounds of summer tourism to “hear” the social, cultural, and political-economic inequities of these intensified times of co-habitation and encounter.