Life in the age of extremes: Reconsidering biopolitical imaginaries in hospitality and tourism

The introduction maps the trajectory of this Special Issue’s key concepts, beginning with the theoretical embeddedness of biopolitics in contexts of crisis. Taking Hannah Arendt’s critical biopolitical reflections as a starting point, the article explores how, in more recent years, different schools of critical thought have approached the governance and protection of various human and nonhuman lifeforms. These evolving axiologies of life have expanded understandings of hospitality – both as an ethic of care and as a situated practice. The contemporary institutional and organizational management of human and nonhuman populations, along with their habitats, corresponds to particular styles of designing planetary futures. In the governance of migration and tourism especially, these styles materialize as imaginaries: blueprints for harmonious planetary existence in an age marked by the polycrises of political extremism, climate change and coerced migration. The article concludes by introducing the individual contributions to the Special Issue and their affiliations with distinct critical schools of thought. Each article offers a perspectival insight into transformations of the biopolitical across the past two centuries, illuminating its entanglements with hospitality, tourism and the politics of life.