Tag: conference

Island Tourism Symposium

The Tourism Research Centre at the University of Greenwich, in partnership with the Observatory on Tourism for Island Economies (OTIE), is holding an afternoon symposium on island tourism, which will be held at our World Heritage Site campus in London on Friday 28th February 2020, 2pm-6pm.

Image result for island tourism

This event will be of interest to island tourism researchers, including postgraduate students, and will be an opportunity to network, discuss new research in island tourism, and learn more about the work of OTIE, Europe’s leading association for the study of tourism in island economies. This is a free event and the programme will include:

A Social Network Analysis of Island Tourism Enterprises: San Vito Lo Capo, Sicily

Prof. Giovanni Ruggieri, Researcher in Tourism Economics, University of Palermo, Italy

Tour of the Pacific Encounters Gallery: https://www.rmg.co.uk/see-do/we-recommend/attractions/pacific-encounters

Dr Aaron Jaffer, Curator of World History and Cultures, National Maritime Museum

Tourism and Hospitality Entrepreneurship in Islands

Paul Booth, Tourism Research Centre, Department of Marketing, Events and Tourism, University of Greenwich

Panel Discussion on Contemporary Issues affecting Island Tourism Destinations

Chaired by Dr Samantha Chaperon, Tourism Research Centre, Department of Marketing, Events and Tourism, University of Greenwich

Places at this event are free, but limited.  Please register you place here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/island-tourism-symposium-tickets-90634535335

If you have any questions about the event, please contact Dr Samantha Chaperon s.a.chaperon@greenwich.ac.uk

Interpreting History Conference

On 19th September, I’ll be speaking at the Interpreting History conference at Alexandra Palace in London.  This looks set to be an excellent event, with a focus on how to interpret historical sites and stories for visitors and tourists.  I’ll be talking about dark tourism, and ways in which destinations can interpret their dark histories to attract this market.  You can view the whole programme and book here.

Alexandra Palace
Alexandra Palace- the conference venue

Curated by the England’s Historic Cities consortium, the host of this one day conference will be Dr Jonathan Foyle, architectural historian and self-confessed “historic buildings obsessive” whose TV appearances uncover those stories that makes history relevant to today’s audiences. Jonathan will be joined by a raft of UK and international speakers from leading visitor attractions, tourist boards, heritage bodies, and companies which are currently leading the agenda in digital and interpretation innovation.

Alongside the conference, there will be an exhibition to allow participants to see demonstrations of or to experience for themselves new interpretive technologies and to discuss in depth with their developers.  And there will also be an opportunity for everyone to experience the £27m renovation of the Theatre and East Court at Alexandra Palace, this wonderful Victorian landmark.

A visit to Belgrade

Last week, Dr Samantha Chaperon and I, from the University of Greenwich, presented at the Belgrade Tourism Conference 2015, which was being held alongside the Belgrade Tourism Fair.  We were invited to speak by Serbia4Youth, an amazing organisation who are working to present Serbia as a destination for young people from across Europe and beyond.

Serbia4Youth brought together a group of academics for an event that was opened by Gordana Plamanec, the Managing Director of the National Tourism Organisation of Serbia.  As well as Samantha and I, delegates heard from Rob Davidson (MICE Knowledge) and Dr Melanie Smith (Budapest Business School), Miha Lesjak (University of Primorska, Slovenia) and Milan Stojkovic (Tourism Management Consultant).

panel discussion
Rob Davidson, Melanie Smith, Samantha Chaperon and I

The conference was one of the most interesting tourism events that I’ve been involved in for a long time – a chance to hear from academics in a region that is often under-represented in academic circles and to listen to the views of young people from the region about how they see the future of tourism and their own careers. I learnt about the extent and significance of spa and health tourism in south-eastern Europe and the innovative marketing of the European Basketball Championships in Solvenia in 2013, as well as the factors affecting tourism entrepreneurship in the region.  You can view our presentations below:

Dr Samantha Chaperon: Tourist Destination Image – Young People’s Perceptions of Serbia

James Kennell: Cultural Tourism and Urban Regeneration in Europe – Lessons for Serbia

As well as a great conference, our hosts showed us some of the traditional culture of Serbia and took us to some of their other events for young people in the city.  Belgrade has so much to offer young people as a destination, not least its nightlife!  We tried to keep up, but eventually gave in and saved our energy for sightseeing…

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UK Tourism Policy

Today, we gave a presentation of our analysis of the UK Government’s tourism policy at the University of the Aegean’s fith annual conference on tourism in Rhodes, Greece.

You can view the presentation below. This presentation was based on this article: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09548963.2013.819662#.UeGLScu9KK0

Crossovers seed-funding competition 2013

Over the last few months in EDReC, we’ve been working with Arts Council England South-East on a project called Crossovers.  The project aimed to explore new relationships between culture, tourism and economic development.  In the Spring, we’ll be publishing a report on the ‘cultural visitor economy’ (CVE).

We held a conference in September 2012 and one of the things that happened on the day was that participants came up with new project ideas – we agreed to seed-fund two of them.

One of the Crossovers logos
One of the Crossovers logos

This year we’re offering two more grants of £1,500 to new projects in the south-east of England that address our key themes: culture, the visitor economy and economic development.

Do you have an idea for a new creative project in the visitor economy?

Have you been thinking about how to bring more tourists to your area using the arts?

Have you been discussing how your cultural project can contribute to your local economy?

We want to see this money being used to kick start innovative projects in the south-east of England.  We don’t want to give you a burden of paperwork that takes up your time when you could be busier doing more creative, effective things.

Using funding from Arts Council England South East, we’ve created a process in which you can enter the competition quickly, with the minimum of form filling, and then, if you win, you can get on with getting your project going.

Here’s how you enter:

Fill in this form

Return it, by email to j.s.kennell@gre.ac.uk by the 1st February 2013

We will make a decision about the two projects that best help us to support new relationships between tourism, culture and economic development in the south-east, and we’ll announce this on 11th February.

 

Tourism and Local Economic Development: ITSA presentation

The ITSA conference venue

This is the presentation that I gave at the 4th Biennial International Tourism Studies Association conference in Indonesia last month.  It was broadly based on this paper about Tourism and Local Economic Development in England.  I’m planning to carry out some interviews with LEP representatives, local authorities and tourism businesses this year and to write-up the whole thing as a journal article in early 2013.

Some conferences give you certificates, but this mask is my favourite ever conference gift

Further Education and Local Economic Development

This is a presentation that I gave last week at the annual Teaching and Learning Conference at Thanet College in Kent, UK.

In my talk, I explored some of the language currently being used by the Government and by OFSTED when they make links between further education and local economic development.  As with much current policy rhetoric in the UK, there are a number of ambiguities in the Government’s views about the future role of FE in local economies and I picked out a couple of these as a way of encouraging the College to think about how it could start to set its own agenda for achieving an ‘excellent’ OFSTED assessment.  In particular, I noted how the culture-led regeneration of Margate and the new Enterprise Zone for East Kent show that the future of local skills development will be in the knowledge economy, meaning that across all areas of the curriculum, teaching and learning should be developing students’ creativity, collaborative skills and flexibility.

I spent half the day at Thanet College and it was a great insight into the current state of Further Education – I learnt a lot from some brief conversations with colleagues there and heard about some fantastic work that is being done.  In particular, it was exciting to hear about how a shift to a student-led, creative curriculum in one subject area had dramatically improved student retention and achievement.

 

Tourism and Local Economic Development in the UK

 Recently, I’ve been working on this topic as part of my work with the Economic Development Resource Centre.  Below are a presentation I gave at an Inside Government event on the visitor economy and the paper that supports it, which was published in the proceedings of the 13th International Research and Practice Conference of the Russian State University for Tourism and Service, ‘Tourism and Service: Education, Challenges and Prospects’, 28th October 2011.

Event: The tourism legacy of the 2012 Olympic Park – 8th December 2011

I’ll be giving a talk at the University of Greenwich on 8th December 2011, on the tourism legacy of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games in London.  The talk will be part of an Olympic Park Legacy Company event that we’re hosting at Greenwich and also speaking will be Clive Little, the new Director of Events and Programming from the OPLC, Kevin Millington , Director of Acorn Tourism Consulting and Tracy Halliwell, Director of Business Tourism and Major Events at London and Partners, the body who have replaced Visit London.

The Olympic Park in Legacy mode

The presentation I gave at this event is below:

Packaging liminality: the management and commodification of liminal landscapes in tourism

Wesley Rykalski and I have had the abstract below accepted for the ATLAS 2011 conference in Valmeira, Latvia.  The theme of the conference is ’Landscape and Tourism: a dualistic relationship”.  Our plan for this paper is to take the methodology that we’ve been developing through the ‘Reading the Arcades / Reading the Promenades’ project over the last two years and apply it to other tourist spaces, in order to test its value as a new approach to engaging with the non-spaces (Auge 1995) of much touristic practice.