Description

Mike Robinson is Professor of Cultural Heritage at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Before this he was Professor of Cultural Heritage at the University of Birmingham and Director of the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage – a partnership with the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust – Europe’s largest independent museum, managing the UNESCO Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site. Mike is Professor Emeritus at the University of Birmingham. Prior to Birmingham University, Mike was founder and director of the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change at the Universities of Sheffield Hallam and Leeds Metropolitan over a twelve-year period where he also held research professorships in Tourism and Culture.

Mike has also held various visiting positions including Visiting Professorships at National Taiwan University (Graduate Institute of Planning) and University of Trento, Italy (Department of Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Heritage), European Union Fellowship at the University of Illinois (Cultural Heritage), Research Fellow at University of KwaZulu-Natal (Department of Literature. He is founder and is editor-in-chief, of the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change (published 6 issues per year by Routledge, Taylor-Francis) and founder and co-editor of the Tourism and Cultural Book Series (Channel View Publications) with over 60 international volumes published.

Working across disciplinary boundaries to generate new thinking, Mike seeks to translate research and examples of best practice to share with the heritage and tourism sectors. He has advised governments, transnational and state organisations, museums and heritage attractions, NGOs and community groups. He has worked on heritage and tourism related projects in over 40 countries and has set new agendas through his publications, creative partnerships, his supervision of more than 30 PhDs and his design and organisation of 35 international academic and practitioner conferences. Mike has held grants from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the US Social Science Research Council, the EU, and several overseas national funding bodies. As an advisor to the UNESCO World Heritage Programme in Sustainable Tourism he was principal consultant to the UNESCO World Heritage European Journeys Project. He was a government appointed member of the UK’s Expert Panel to determine the UK’s Tentative List for World Heritage and has worked with UNESCO offices in China, South East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and various parts of Europe. He works closely with the Council of Europe’s Cultural Routes Programme.

Mike’s research concerns the ways in which societies continually produce both tangible and intangible heritage and, the ever-changing ways this heritage is consumed by tourists and local communities. He places emphasis on the shifting values ascribed to heritage and how these shape and inscribe narratives and meanings. He is interested in what heritage does and what it can do; how it can be mobilised to transform place, people and local economies in sustainable and meaningful ways. The scope of his work stretches from the issues surrounding the sustainability and the changing historic and geographic cultural resonances of World Heritage (Book: World Heritage Tourism and Identity: Inscription and Co-production), to the emergence of ‘new’ heritage generated through the absorption of popular culture (Book: Encounters with Popular Pasts: Cultural Heritage and Popular Culture). Mike’s work in the field of critical tourism studies (Sage Handbook of Tourism Studies) continues to assist how we value and understand different forms of heritage in symbolic ways (Books include: Literature and Tourism: The Reading and Writing of Tourism;Festivals Tourism and Social Change; Cultural Tourism in a Changing World: Politics, Participation and (Re)presentation; The Framed World: Tourism, Tourists and Photography) and in an emotional sense (Book: Emotion in Motion: Tourism, Affect and Transformation).

This session will be recorded and uploaded here following the session. Any questions can be written on the discussion board.