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2024-2025 Colloquium Series

Lecturing to Tourists about Tourism: Thirty Years of Enrichment Speaking for Alumni Travel Programs Abroad

Dr. Laurence Michalak
Cultural Anthropologist, PhD, UC Berkeley

with

Nan Dillard (Discussant)
Director of Cal Discoveries, PhD, UC Berkeley

Friday, October 11, 4PM-6PM PDT

Hybrid Presentation
In Person:
Gifford Room, 221 Anthropology and Art Practice Bldg. University of California, Berkeley
On Zoom:
[click here] *

Please join us for dinner and further conversation at the Great China Restaurant, Bancroft Avenue, Berkeley (6:15pm). RSVP required for dinner. Please e-mail graburn@berkeley.edu

*There is no password needed to join this meeting. However, please ensure that you are logged into your Zoom account before clicking on the meeting link.

Abstract
Larry will discuss the specialized niche of alumni travel and the mediated tourist experience that it represents. He will draw on over 30 years of enrichment lecturing, having lectured for the Smithsonian Travel Program beginning in 1993. From 1998 to the present he has been an Enrichment Lecturer and Faculty Host for 30 tours abroad for Cal Discoveries, which is part of the University of California Alumni Association. Alumni tours are land tours or cruises that last a week or two, with organized excursions and cultural activities for small groups of about 12 to 24 people. The Enrichment Lecturer gives lectures, hosts a reception, writes a report, takes publicity photos and organizes a reunion, but is otherwise essentially in a kind of liminal position as a tourist among tourists.

Speaker Bio
Dr. Laurence Michalak is a cultural anthropologist (Ph.D. UC Berkeley 1983) and long-time participant in the TSWG. Larry is a specialist in North Africa, having lived and worked for about 12 years in Tunisia. He is from Woodland, California, with B.A. from Stanford (1964) and M.A. from SOAS/University of London (1970). He was a Peace Corps Volunteer and Associate Peace Corps Director and Training Director in Tunisia and Ivory Coast. At UC/Berkeley he was Vice Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and taught Middle Eastern Area Studies for 23 years, retiring in 2002 to take other teaching and research positions, including Semester at Sea (Fall 2005), the Center for Maghreb Studies in Tunis (2006-10), and some hire-backs for teaching at UC/Berkeley. He speaks Arabic and French, fair Spanish and some German and has traveled widely in North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. He has taught, lectured and written on migration, globalization, tourism, food, and problems of economic development and is the author of books on social legislation and labor migration. He is currently working on a book on the informal economy in Tunisia.

Discussant Bio
Nan Dillard is an expert on alumni travel and Director of Cal Discoveries, the travel program of the University of California/Berkeley Alumni Association. Cal Discoveries organizes 60 or 70 travel programs each year for UC/Berkeley alumni and friends. Most major universities in the United States now have alumni travel programs, which have become a significant travel genre. UC/Berkeley was one of the first such travel programs and is one of the larger ones in the U.S.

 
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