Projects
Tourism and politics of place making in the context of the Arab-Israeli onflict Ghent University
The objective of the ethnographic research is to examine how touristic place-making projects are carried out in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. A genealogical inquiry of the Jordan River Peace Park aims to contribute to the wider academic discussions on politics of tourism place-making and power.
Borders, a blessing in disguise? A structural analysis of tourism and regional development processes in European borderlands KU Leuven
Solutions for regional development questions are increasingly sought in cross-border cooperative arrangements. The tourism sector is often assigned with a high potential in this regard due to the sector’s alleged contributions to the economic viability and quality of life in rural destinations, and the assumed ease with which cross-border tourism projects can be initiated. However, the underlying mechanisms behind tourism-related regional ...
Imaginaries reconfigured: development and resistance in Myanmar tourism KU Leuven
Following advances in the anthropological study of tourism ‘imaginaries’ and renewed focus on the dispossession and inequality wrought by development, this project takes an ethnographic approach in examining how imaginaries motivate, structure, and justify tourism development. Actively unfolding sociocultural formations and processes of development are surveyed with a case study in Dawei District, southern Myanmar, generating novel insights ...
Traveling words and images. A study of tourist fiction and non-fiction of contemporary Spain and Latin America KU Leuven
This project focuses on the impact of tourism on contemporary fiction and non-fiction in the Hispanic world. While both Spain and Latin America can boast a long tradition of travel writing, tourism’s more recent impact on their cultures has gone largely unnoticed. This is due to persisting prejudices concerning tourism as an inferior, more mass-consumerist practice than travelling, as well as to a predominantly sociological approach in ...
Sabbatical Nadia Lie: Tourist Fiction from Latin America. KU Leuven
This application is part of the FWO project G086819N 'Traveling words and images: A Study of Tourist Fiction and Non-Fiction in the Hispanic World' (2019-2022), which I supervise in collaboration with Dagmar Vandebosch (KULeuven campus Kortrijk) and cultural anthropologist Paolo Favero (University of Antwerp). Within this project I am in charge of the general supervision as well as the implementation of WP3, which amounts to writing an ...
The Media-Tourist: 'Mediation', Image-Making, and Enchantment in Tourists' Experiences of Antwerp, Naples and Helsinki. University of Antwerp
Tours on Paper. Literary Explorations of the Itinerarium in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Ghent University
Although pilgrimage characterised Christianity from its beginnings, the fourth century saw a dramatic increase of travelling to the Holy Land and Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Rome. This is reflected in a boom of "itineraria": texts describing the routes to and from the holy sites, as well as the places and monuments encountered along the way. These works did not just have a utilitarian function as a travel guide, but were also conceived as ...
The making of Havana’s property market KU Leuven
This study aims to reconstruct Cuba’s economic transition with a particular focus on the making of the property market in the country’s capital city of Havana. The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally circulating capital has increasingly found its ways into the property markets of the ‘Global South’. The restrictions of underdeveloped financial and real estate markets in these countries ...
The five first words. Multilingual cities in Switzerland and Belgium and the grammar of language choice in public space. KU Leuven
This project studies how unacquainted persons spontaneously engage in interaction in multilingual cities in Switzerland and Belgium. In consequence, it investigates language practices in present-day, urban environments. Officially multilingual cities, such as Fribourg (Switzerland) and Brussels (Belgium), have received extended attention with regard to how language policies are locally implemented. Little is known, however, about how people ...