[ecrea] PhD vacancy: Culture, tourism and the media

PHD VACANCY: CULTURE, TOURISM AND THE MEDIA

I’m happy to announce two vacancies for PhD candidates in the field of 
culture, tourism and the media. The PhD students will become part of a 
project entitled “Imagining the City. Mobilities of Belonging in a 
Globalized World”. For more information on the project, please see 
below. For more information on the requirements and conditions of 
employment, please check the following website:

https://www.academictransfer.com/employer/EUR/vacancy/41093/lang/en/

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“Imagining the City: Mobilities of Belonging in a Globalized World”

The tourism industry is one of the major sources of income for many 
cities. Nevertheless much is still unclear about what it is that causes 
a city to become popular. Nor is clear what an increase in tourism does 
to the self-perception of an urban community. Central to either process 
is the imagining of the city’s identity. Through a mix of 
cross-sectional and case study research design (including the use of 
content analysis, (n)ethnographic research and qualitative interviews), 
our project will investigate how this image is created and appropriated 
and which tensions underlie that process. We propose to compare a small 
sample of cities that have recently undergone a process of 
‘touristification’. On the one hand the research focusses on the wide 
array of manifestations in which the city is represented. This will vary 
from popular movies and TV series to travel guides, tourist brochures, 
city walks, museum exhibitions and guided tours. What narratives and 
visuals describing a city’s identity and heritage are put out there by 
whom, for what reasons and in what fashion? One of the assumptions 
underlying this project is that the representation of the city is a 
hybrid product of a merging between the media and tourism industries. On 
the other hand the research will focus on how these cities – e.g. 
through ethnographic research, qualitative interviews and analysis of 
user-generated-content – are experienced and appropriated by both 
tourists and residents. In what ways do residents and visitors 
experience and perceive the urban landscape? How do their interactions 
with the city shape its identity and heritage? We are explicitly 
interested in alternative views on a city’s identity and heritage. Which 
groups facilitate these alternative views, in which ways, and how do 
these views relate to the more sanitized pictures generated by the 
tourism industry? In addition, we would welcome an exploration of the 
cultural economic perspective on the touristification of 21th-century 
cities. What are the possible benefits but also disadvantages related to 
increased influx of tourists, and how does it affect the sustainability 
and reputation of the cities under scrutiny?

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