Tracing tourism with Bruno Latour: actor-network theory, critical proximity and down to earth

Bruno Latour passed away October 9 2022. At the age of 75 he was still actively dealing with pertinent questions of human existence on Earth through relational thought and tools he started to develop in the 1970s. Latour’s intellectual work is difficult to classify into disciplinary categories; it traverses the boundaries of philosophy, anthropology and sociology as well as geography and has also been translated by others into for instance tourism studies.
Question is how to account for the merits of someone, whose academic career has been focused on de-centering agency as a merely human capacity and on understanding power as distributed and networked? How to sum up the work of a research capacity, whose work has impacted the social and human sciences in such profound ways? One way could be to do as Latour himself and decenter human agency. Rather than approaching Latour as the actor and attempting to do justice to his legacy in a all-encompassing way (as if this is ever possible), we take Latour’s idea that every actor is a network as a starting point. Thus, to pay a tribute to his influence and inspiration, we re-trace the trajectory of his (net)work, and this leads into the field of tourism studies.