UC Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group

If you are interested in becoming a research affiliate with the Tourism Studies Working Group and you will be in residence in Northern California during the coming year, send a description of your work and your curriculum vitae to tourism (at) berkeley.edu. For post-doctoral/visiting scholar affiliation, please see our visiting scholar information page before contacting us.

Laura Bathurst, a sociocultural anthropologist and Latin American specialist, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Studies in the School of International Studies at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. Dr. Bathurst received her B.A. in Anthropology and Modern Languages (Spanish) from Kansas State University and her MA and Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. An enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she has long been interested in indigenous issues. Her dissertation, "Reconfiguring Identities: Tacana Retribalization in Bolivia's Amazon Basin" reflects this interest.

Dr. Bathurst has conducted research in Bolivia, Spain, and the United States. Her research and teaching interests include Latin America, the Amazon basin, identity, power and control, indigenous issues, linguistic anthropology, and intercultural communication. At Pacific, she teaches classes in anthropology and international studies and assists with the continual development and implementation of Pacific’s innovative integrated pre-departure orientation and reentry program for students studying abroad. She also serves as Academic Director of the MA in Intercultural Relations.

Mark F. DeWitt was recently appointed the Dr. Tommy Comeaux Endowed Chair in Traditional Music at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he is a Professor of Music.

Dr. DeWitt's research focuses on music's evocation of faraway places, for people who have lived in those places, for those who have never been to them, and for tourists. The activities of folk revivalists, both musicians and dancers who spend significant amounts of time learning and doing cultural activities that were not part of their family background or upbringing, are also phenomena that command his attention. These interests stem from his dissertation field research, which took place among Creole and Cajun immigrants from Louisiana and Texas, along with many folk revivalists, who play and dance to Louisiana French music here in northern California.

His book published in October 2008, Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California: Modern Pleasures in a Postmodern World (University Press of Mississippi), explains how ethnicity, tourism and revivalism--i.e., both insider and outsider perspectives--can work together to sustain social dance and music-making far away from a culture's place of origin.

Representative publication: "Heritage, Tradition and Travel: Louisiana French Culture Placed on a California Dance Floor." The World of Music 41.3(1999):57-83.

deweitt (at) louisiana.edu

STEPHANIE HOM

Stephanie Hom is Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma, and co-founder of the UC Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group. She holds an MA and PhD in Italian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA with honors in International Relations from Brown University. She served as Co-Chair of the Working Group in 2003-04, 2004-05, and 2005-06.

Her current research projects explore the relationships between modern mass tourism, colonialism, and national identities. She is the author of several articles on such wide-ranging topics as tourist narratives and constructions of subjectivity, the vocabularies of nationalism in the work of Ippolito Nievo, and the discourse of metaphor in the "Mediterranean." She is currently at work on two book projects. The first book, tentatively titled Touring Italy: Toward a Discourse of Italian Travel, maps out the representations and practices of travel—namely through mass tourism—that have shaped Italy as a modern and mobile imaginary. The second book, as of yet untitled, traces the evolution of Italian colonial travel writing between the Mediterranean (Rhodes, Libya) and East Africa (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia).

Her interests include tourism and travel theory; travel literature; Italian anthropology and folkore; Italian theories of post/modernity; the Risorgimento; Italian fascism; neorealism in literature and cinema; the Italian colonial experience; and theories of space/place.

Representative publication: "The Tourist Moment." Annals of Tourism Research 31(2004): 61-77

shcary (at) ou.edu

ROBIN L. TURNER

Robin L. Turner is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Butler University. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from UC Berkeley, an MA in Political Studies from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and a BA with honors in Public Policy Studies from Duke University. She served as Co-Chair of the Working Group in 2007-08.

Robin’s research interests focus on the relationship between people, the state, and natural resources. This encompasses three themes: the political economy of resource-based sectors (nature tourism, mineral extraction), the politics of conservation, and urban environmental justice politics.

Robin's dissertation,Politics Where the Wild Things Are: Nature Tourism, Property Rights, and Traditional Leadership in Rural Botswana and South Africaseeks to answer the question, how does engagement in tourism affect local political relations? Robin conducted fieldwork in four nature tourism destinations -- the eastern Okavango Delta and Northern Tuli Game Reserve in Botswana, and Madikwe Game Reserve and Mapungubwe National Park in South Africa -- and ten nearby localities -- two freehold farming areas and eight villages.

Representative publication: "Communities, Wildlife Conservation, and Tourism-Based Development: Can Community-Based Nature Tourism Live up to Its Promise?" Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy 7(2004): 161-182.

rlturner (at) berkeley.edu

ALEX WESTHOFF

Alex Westhoff received a joint Masters of Landscape Architecture and Masters of City Planning in the Departments of Landscape Architecture/Environmental Planning and City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. He also holds a B.S. in Animal and Plant Systems from the University of Minnesota.

His academic studies have centered around the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta area, regarding issues of urban growth containment, agricultural conservation, and riparian corridors. Through his thesis he proposed the idea of the Delta obtaining a National Heritage Area designation which could help preserve the many unique features of the region in a sustainable manner. Since completion of his thesis, he has continued to work on this project through his position with the Delta Protection Commission. He was also awarded the Scott Traveling Scholarship from the Department of Landscape Architecture/Environmental Planning which enabled him to travel to several countries in Africa and Europe to examine sustainable tourism development in other delta landscapes.

Representative text: The Sacramento Delta National Heritage Corridor. Master's Thesis, Landscape Architecture/Environmental Planning and City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley, 2008.

alexw (at) berkeley.edu

Lu Jin
Ph.D Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Xiamen University, China
Topic: Ecomuseums and rural tourism in Guizhou
Period: 2009-2011

Lu Jin is a Ph.D candidate at Xiamen University and a visiting scholar at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, 2009-2011. Her research interests focus on the anthropology of museums, tourism anthropology, heritage theories, and ecological anthropology. Her current work focuses on a new form of museum known as "ecomuseums," questioning to what extent they preserve material cultures better than traditional museums. Based on research in ecomuseums in Guizhou, China, she explores how ethnic identity is formed and the role of the ecomuseum in preserving ethnic cultures, the interaction between inhabitants of a community and their living space, and conflict between tourism and preservation of ethnic cultures.

Madina Regnault
Ph.D. Candidate, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences, Paris, France
Topic: Cultural Policies and Tourism in French Overseas Territories (La Reunion, Mayotte)
Period: 2010-2011

Coming from a Political Science background (Master Degree from the Sorbonne - Paris 1), Madina Regnault is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Development Studies at the EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) and a Visiting Scholar in Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Based on a multidisciplinary approach, her works analyze the political and identity issues of cultural tourism promotion in Reunion Island and Mayotte Island, the two French territories located in the Western Indian Ocean.

Kojun "Jun" Ueno Sunseri
Post Doctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Period: 2010

Jun is a broadly-trained anthropological archaeologist, with foundations in spatial analysis, zooarchaeology, and ceramic analysis, having field experience in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, and South Africa. His research interests focus on the relationships between colonization and the historical transformation of indigenous landscapes, foodways, and identities.

His current research explores how 18th Century New Mexicans’ lived experiences as members of different communities of practice patterned their material record in accordance and in tension with ascribed casta identities on frontiers far from direct enforcement by Spanish Colonial officials. His work uses multiple, complementary lines of evidence of varied types and spatial scales, including: 1) analysis of archaeological faunal and ceramic assemblages related to domestic foodways and 2) GIS analysis of remote sensing, survey, and excavation data to recognize patterning of the tactical, engineered, and ritual landscapes of his study area. By placing these suites of data in dialogue with each other as well as oral and documentary history, Jun has challenged previous explanations of the ways that frontier communities expressed various facets of their identities in different contexts and scales of social performance. In this way, late colonial archaeological sites, the cultural processes that created them, and the histories of contemporary communities which have long been dichotomized as “Spanish” or “Indian” are approached in more nuanced and textured ways.

Betrand Réau
Associate Professor, Sociology, University of Lyon
Topic: Sustainable tourism
Period: April-May, 2009

Lina Tegtmeyer
MA Candidate, JFK Institute for North American Studies, Free University Berlin, Germany
Topic: Representing urban America
Period: January-April, 2009

Jinfu Zhang
Assistant Professor, Department of Tourism, Xiamen University, China
Topic: Development and social impact of tourism in Tibet; sacred journeys and religious lives
Period: January-December, 2007

David Crouch
Visting Professor, Universities of Karlstad and Kalmar, Sweden; Professor, Cultural Geography, and Director, Applied Research Group in Tourism, University of Derby, UK.
Representative publications:
Co-editor, The Media and the Tourist Imagination (Routledge, 2005)
Co-editor, Visual Culture and Tourism (Berg, 2003)
Editor, Leisure/Tourism Geographies (Routledge, 1999)
Period: April-May, 2007

David Picard
Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds University, UK.
Representative publications:
Co-editor, Festivals, Tourism and Social Change (Channel View Publications, 2006)
Co-author, Tourism, Culture and Sustainable Development (UNESCO, 2006)
Period: September-December, 2006

Rodrigo Grünewald
Professor, Anthropology and Sociology, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, Brazil
Editorial Board, Annals of Tourism Research
Representative publication:
"Tourism and Cultural Revival." Annals of Tourism Research 29 (2002)
Period: September 2005-August 2006