THE PARTNERS
Assoc. Prof. Christine Lundberg
Associate Professor Christine Lundberg works as a Senior Lecturer at the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, University of Surrey, UK. Her research focuses primarily on fan tourism, fandoms, social media usage, servicescapes, destination development, service encounters, and employee relations. These topics have been the main focus of her studies which have resulted in internationally published works in journals and books. She is also an avid user of social media as a means for communicating research findings.
C.Lundberg(a)surrey.ac.uk
Assoc. Prof. Maria Lexhagen
Dr Maria Lexhagen is an Associate Professor and former Director of ETOUR (European Tourism Research Institute), Mid Sweden University. Her research on popular culture tourism focuses on fan behaviour and the importance and effect of web based information and social media interaction. In particular, She is intrigued by the motivations and perceived value from popular culture experiences as well as fan involvement with other fans and the pop culture phenomenon itself in terms of mixing fantasy and reality based on lots of emotional elements.
Maria.Lexhagen(a)miun.se
Assoc. Prof. Szilvia Gyimóthy
Szilvia Gyimóthy is Associate Professor at the Tourism Research Unit, Department of Culture & Global Studies, Aalborg University in Denmark. Her primary research interest lies in strategic market communications in tourism, with a focus on narrative practices of commodification and competitive differentiation of regions in the experience economy. Szilvia is particularly interested in the engagement of visitors and leisure communities in collaborative communicative endeavours as well as in understanding new value creation phenomena on social media platforms. In the past few years, Szilvia’s research activities have been defined by popcultural place-making, with studies focusing on the narrative reterritorialisation of European destinations along culinary inventions, outdoor adventures, fashion and Bollywood productions.
Gyimothy(a)cgs.aau.dk
Dr Kristina Lindström
Dr Kristina Lindström works as a Senior Lecturer at Gotheburg University, Sweden. Drawing on the fields of tourism and media, Kristina’s research concerns the connections between popular culture, creative industries and the tourism industries from a geographical perspective. Her main research focus is to portray the transformation of local communities to spaces of production and consumption of tourist experiences, as well as collaboration between traditional and creative industries and the role of policy in such regional transformation processes.
Kristina.Lindstrom(a)handels.gu.se
Stavroula Wallström (MSc)
Stavroula Wallström is a Lecturer and PhD-student at the University College of Borås, Sweden. Her research primarily focuses on service encounters. In connection to tourism she is mainly interested in fans and their motivations, value creation and social media usage.
Stavroula.Wallstrom(a)hb.se
Assoc. Prof. Mia Larson
Mia Larson received her Ph.D. in business administration from the School of Business, Economics and Law at Gothenburg University, Sweden, on the topic event management and network cooperation. She is now Associate Professor at the Department of Service Management and Service Studies, Campus Helsingborg (Lund University, Sweden). She publishes research in international journals and books, dealing with such topics as tourism development focused on popular culture tourism and coastal tourism, event and festival management, and social media.
Mia.Larson(a)ism.lu.se
THE ASSOCIATES
Assoc. Prof. Vassilios Ziakas
Dr. Vassilios Ziakas is an Associate Professor at Plymouth Marjon University, UK. Vassilios studies leisure policy through an interdisciplinary lens focusing on strategy development for leveraging leisure services and events in order to obtain a range of sustainable community benefits. This work has introduced and conceptualised the study of event portfolios as a means for multi-purpose development. Vassilios’s ongoing research investigates the interconnections of leisure pursuits with culture, heritage, tourism, and community development in order to enable the potential for leverage.
Dr Anne Buchmann
Dr Anne Buchmann is lecturing at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and travels extensively for research and speaking commitments. Her research interests include Film Tourism and Mediatised Tourism, including sense of place, fan engagement and travel narratives; as well as Secular Pilgrimages and modern myth making, authenticity and embodiment. Specifically, Anne has been investigating the film tourism phenomenon in Aotearoa New Zealand since 2000, and now specialises in tourism inspired by The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Doctor Who and Sherlock and their ever-changing interpretations. Anne disseminates her study findings to both academic and public audiences in scholarly journal articles and book chapters, as well as social media postings, newspaper articles, radio interviews, and contributed to feature-length documentaries.
Assoc. Prof. Malin Sundström
Dr. Malin Sundström is an Associate Professor at University of Borås, Sweden. She is also the Academic Director of The Swedish Institute for Innovative Retailing (SIIR). Malin studies retailing and customer behavior focusing on the digitized and transforming retailing landscape with technology and IT-devices. She is one of the leading retailing experts in Sweden and her work is published both in academic journals and books. Malin’s ongoing research investigates the interconnection of experienced based shopping, showrooms and customer added value, i.e. with the help of the Internet trying to immerse consumers in a virtual and physical experience.
Dr Philip Long
Dr Philip Long is Associate Professor and former head of the Department of Tourism and Hospitality at Bournemouth University. His previous academic posts were at Leeds Beckett and Sheffield Hallam Universities. His current research interests and publications include work on: festivals, cultural events and their tourism dimensions; connections between creative industries and tourism; diaspora communities, social exclusion and tourism; and partnerships and collaboration in tourism development. Philip maintains long-standing links with the tourism, festivals and cultural sectors through his board membership of the International Festivals and Events Association (Europe) and fellowship of the Tourism Management Institute. Prior to his 30 year academic career, Philip worked for 12 years in the tourism industry in the UK and Zimbabwe.
Dr Alkmini Gkritzali
Dr. Alkmini Gkritzali is a Lecturer in Tourism at the University of Surrey. Her research interests include the way destinations and their images develop and transform in everyday life, through popular culture projections, offline and online storytelling, intercultural stereotyping or even major social, political or natural crises. Alkmini is passionate about destinations and popular culture, viewing them not as products, but as powerful experiences, which can create memories of a lifetime and change people’s lives.
Prof. ShiNa Li
Dr ShiNa Li is a Professor at Sun Yat-Sen University, China. Her previous academic positions were at University of Surrey, Leeds Beckett University and University of Nottingham in the UK. Her current research interests lie in tourism economics, poverty reduction and regional development, regional and national economic impacts of tourism and events, economic geography, tourism and industry structure. She has applied computable general equilibrium modelling to evaluate the economic impact of the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit on New Zealand’s economy.
Dr. Wen (Stella) Tian
Dr. Wen (Stella) Tian holds a joint PhD degree in Information Systems from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) and University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). She has a strong cross-disciplinary research background of studying the behavioral, managerial, technological, and societal impact brought by the development of digital technologies. Her research interest focuses on the visitor experience, technology innovation, and collaborative virtual communities. She is a skilled researcher in the neuro-marketing method such as eye-tracking, facial expression and galvanic skin response analysis. Dr. Tian is currently a Research Fellow affiliated to the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, University of Surrey.
Dr. Rodanthi Tzanelli
Dr. Rodanthi Tzanelli is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology at Leeds University, UK. Her general research interests include globalization, cosmopolitanism and mobility theory. Her current project focuses on ways of overcoming fundamentalism in scholarly, policy and everyday conceptions of popular culture; continuities and discontinuities between the latter and cultures of populism; and the role of hope in neoliberal contexts of consumption (tourism, filmmaking and filmwatching). In all these domains, she interrogates the role senses and emotions play in articulations of the human experience, especially in current milieus of the Anthropocene. She is author of several academic articles, book chapters, blog posts and 10 books, including the Thanatourism and Cinematic Representations of Risk: Screening the End of Tourism (Routledge, 2016) and Mega-Events as Economies of the Imagination: Creating Atmospheres for Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 (Routledge, 2017).