Promoting Responsible Tourism by Exploring Sea-voyage Migration Narratives through ELF: An Experiential-linguistic Approach to Multicultural Community Integration

This paper reports on a research project in Responsible Tourism (Prayag, Hosany, & Odeh, 2013) carried out at the University of Salento in collaboration with the local administrations of some seaside resorts in Southern Italy affected by migrants’ massive arrivals. This project, which involves tourists, migrants, university students in intercultural mediation and local communities, applies a model of Experiential-Linguistics (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) to a multimodal Ethnopoetic analysis (Hymes, 2003; Kress, 2009) of (a) non-Western migrants’ traumatic accounts of journeys across the sea, reported in their own ELF variations (Guido, 2008, 2018), (b) Western epic narratives of Mediterranean dramatic voyages rendered from Ancient Greek and Latin into modern ELF variations, and (c) multimodal representations of the ethnopoetic rhythms of such ancient and modern sea-journey narratives through the production of a promotional video. The aim is to highlight the experiential common roots shared by classical-epic and contemporary migration narratives. Three main research phases will be explored, which are characterised by pedagogical activities meant to foster an active, multicultural community integration, as well as a view of tourism as an inclusive social experience.