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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Moroccan youth use Instagram to challenge racialized tourism narratives. Drawing on Cultural Studies, it analyzes digital storytelling as a form of cultural resistance that reframes Moroccan cultural tourism beyond exoticized and minoritizing representations.

Paper long abstract

Tourism has long played a central role in the production and circulation of cultural representations, often reproducing racialized and exoticized imaginaries of non-Western destinations. In the case of Morocco, dominant tourism narratives have historically emphasized timelessness, tradition, and otherness, contributing to the marginalization and simplification of local cultural identities. Drawing on Cultural Studies and tourism scholarship, this paper examines how Moroccan youth engage with social media—particularly Instagram—to challenge and reframe these racializing processes through alternative forms of cultural storytelling. Therefore, this paper adopts a qualitative digital ethnographic approach, analyzing Instagram posts and reels produced by Moroccan youth, cultural content creators, and grassroots tourism

initiatives. Through visual and thematic content analysis, this study explores how everyday cultural practices, local aesthetics, and lived experiences are mobilized to construct counter-narratives of Moroccan tourism that foreground agency, contemporaneity, and cultural plurality. Rather than presenting culture as a static spectacle for consumption, these digital narratives emphasize relationality, community, and situated meanings of place. By treating social media

content as cultural texts, the study highlights how youth-led digital tourism practices function as spaces of symbolic resistance, where racialized representations are negotiated, contested, and re-signified. The findings suggest that social media operates not merely as a promotional tool, but as a cultural arena in which power relations embedded in tourism discourse are actively reworked.

Keywords : Cultural tourism, social media, youth digital storytelling, racialization, cultural representation, Moroccan tourism, Instagram