Space, Mobility, and Crisis in Mega-Event Organisation: Tokyo Olympics 2020’s Atmospheric Irradiations

This book advances an alternative critical posthumanist approach to mega-event organisation, taking into account both the new and the old crises which humanity and our planet face. Taking the delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games as a case study, Tzanelli explores mega-event crisis and risk management in the era of extreme urbanisation, natural disasters, global pandemic, and technoscientific control.

Using the atmospheric term ’irradiation’ (a technology of glamour and transparency, as well as bodily penetration by harmful agents and strong affects), the book explores this epistemological statement diachronically (via Tokyo’s relationship with Western forms of domination) and synchronically (the city as a global cultural-political player but victim of climate catastrophes). It presents how the ’Olympic enterprise’s’ ’flattening’ of indigenous environmental place-making rhythms, and the scientisation of space and place in the Anthropocene lead to reductionisms harmful for a viable programme of planetary recovery.

An experimental study of the mega-event is enacted, which considers the researcher’s analytical tools and the styles of human and non-human mobility during the mega-event as reflexive gateways to forms of posthuman flourishing. Crossing and bridging disciplinary boundaries, the book will appeal to any scholar interested in mobilities theory, event and environment studies, sociology of knowledge, and cultural globalisation.

Rodanthi Tzanelli is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Mobilities Research Area in the Bauman Institute, University of Leeds, UK. She is a social and cultural theorist of mobility (tourism, social movements, mega-events, and technology) with particular reference to the representational discourses, regimes of consumption, and crises induced by capitalism and climate change. She is author of numerous critical interventions, research articles, and chapters, as well as 14 monographs including Cultural (Im)mobilities and the Virocene: Mutating the Crisis (2021).