Panel Discussion: Emeritus Professor David Airey (University of Surrey, UK), Dr Freya Higgins-Desbiolles (University of South Australia) and David Williamson (Auckland University of Technology, NZ)

Date: Wednesday, 8 February 2017
Time: 2pm-3pm
Location: CAUTHE 2017 conference – University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ
Room: St David 1 (G02)

We hope you can join us to explore and discuss critical approaches in tourism and hospitality. This panel discussion will focus on the place of tourism and hospitality studies, and tourism and hospitality work, in this new Trump/Brexit space.  We will consider what role tourism and tourism academia can play in advocating and advancing justice, human rights and peace in such circumstances. The panel members will present for around 10 minutes each, followed by discussion.

1. David Airey will sketch the position of tourism/hospitality as an area of study in the Academy commenting on its fortunes past and future.
2. Freya Higgins-Desbiolles will consider recent political events in the USA and elsewhere and outline the implications for tourism and hospitality as progress towards international law, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, women’s rights, environmental sustainability and peace and security is under threat.
3. David Williamson will look at tourism/hospitality industry work. David will argue that we need to relook at how we conceive work because focussing on intra-organisational, managerialist, thin-slice positivist research in the times of Brexit and Trumpism is surely ‘to risk the academic equivalent of re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic’.

We hope you can join us in this discussion.

For more information contact the SIG coordinators.