ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a political ecology approach to understand how tourists attempt to make sense of the environments they encounter during slum tours in Mumbai, India. A political ecology perspective moves beyond simplistic critiques of the representations and practices of slum tours to shed light on the specific ways in which Western tourists encounter, and are part of, the ecologies of slum environments in Mumbai. The tours draw upon subtle power relationships through neoliberal self-help narratives, which lead indirectly to the visitors evaluating their own Western positionalities. The managed 'shock' the tourists experience is of the everyday normalities of the visited slum spaces. The chapter examines how political ecology scholars need to address the subtleties involved in tourism encounters in terms of power, place and historical legacy and how these are reconfigured in contemporary tourists' slum tour experiences.
