Tourism RESET is a place for professional collaboration and exchange between scholars who are doing work in the areas of race, ethnicity, and social equity in tourism.
Establishing this network of like minded scholars will facilitate the holding of conferences, joint projects and publications, and the connection of research professionals with community and industry groups. RESET is a multi-university and interdisciplinary effort conducted jointly by the Department of Geography and the Department of Retail, Hospitality, and Tourism Management at the University of Tennessee, the Department of Political Science, International Development, and International Affairs at the University of Southern Mississippi, the Hospitality and Tourism Management program at Appalachian State, the Hospitality & Tourism Management program at San Diego State University, Department of Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Management at North Carolina State University, and the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at East Carolina University.
As a RESET Research Fellows, these academics create monthly blog posts, assist with marketing RESET, and have an active intent to publish journal articles, book chapters, or other pieces consistent with RESET’s themes. Below, are the Research Fellows for Tourism RESET.
Derek Alderman, PhD
Founder & Co-Director
I am a cultural and historical geographer interested in race relations, public memory, popular culture, and heritage tourism in the U.S. South. Much of my work focuses on the rights of African Americans to claim the power to commemorate the past and shape cultural landscapes as part of a broader goal of social and spatial justice.
dalderma@utk.edu
Stefanie Benjamin, PhD
Co-Director
Stefanie Benjamin, PhD, CHE is an Associate Professor in the Retail, Hospitality, and Tourism Management department at the University of Tennessee. Her research interests include social equity in tourism around the intersectionality of race, gender, sexual orientation, and people with disabilities. She also researches film-induced tourism, implements improvisational theater games as innovative pedagogy, and is a certified qualitative researcher exploring ethnography, visual methodology, and social media analysis. Lastly, she serves as a Faculty Advisor on the Equity and Diversity Board for the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity & Engagement at UTK.
sbenjam1@utk.edu
Alana Dillette, PhD
Co-Director
Alana Dillette is an Associate Professor in the Payne School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at San Diego State University. Originally from the islands of The Bahamas, she is always trying to maintain her connection to home through research on sustainable tourism initiatives for small island states. Her other research interests include issues around diversity and inclusion, more specifically looking at the intersection between tourism, race, gender & ethnicity. Currently, she is working on research to gain a better understanding of the African-American travel experience.
adillette@sdsu.edu
Emmanuel Akwasi Adu-Ampong, PhD
Emmanuel Akwasi Adu-Ampong is an Assistant Professor at the Cultural Geography group at Wageningen University and Research, the Netherlands since April, 2019. Prior to this, he was a Senior Lecturer in Tourism and International Development at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK from 2017 to 2019. His ongoing research project on the geographies of slavery heritage tourism seeks to synthesize the relational notions of place and embodied performativity in cultural geography with notions of transformative cross-cultural encounters in critical tourism studies and ideas about the social construction of heritage in critical heritage studies. The goal is to show how tourism as socio-cultural practices and performances can generate cultural and political affect across space that increases historical awareness while challenging and (re)creating new narratives about slavery’s past and present. Currently, he is focused on slavery heritage tourism practices and performances within the Ghana-Suriname-Netherlands triangle. The long term goal of his research is to render slavery heritage tourism sites as places of remembrance, dialogue and change that speaks to broader societal issues about the past, identity and belonging. His research interest beyond geographies of slavery heritage tourism include sustainable tourism development policy and planning, cultural heritage management and innovations in qualitative research methodology & methods.
emmanuel.adu-ampong@wur.nl
@AduAmpong_EA
aduampongemmanuel.wordpress.com
Ethan Bottone, PhD
Ethan Bottone is Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Northwest Missouri State University. His research explores black mobility and motility as embodied in the Green Book. He has research interests in other areas of just tourism, including the inclusion of people with disabilities and the interpretation of American Indian removal at tourism destinations, and also serves as a Research Fellow for Tourism RESET.
ebottone91@gmail.com
Jordan Brasher, PhD
Jordan Brasher is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Columbus State University (Columbus, Georgia, USA) and an affiliated faculty in the Columbus Community Geography Center. His research explores the politics of remembering slavery and the Confederacy at heritage tourism sites in the Americas. His dissertation examined the transnational political dimensions and racialized controversies around commemorating the Confederacy in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, São Paulo, Brazil. Jordan takes a publicly engaged approach to his research and writing, which have appeared in outlets like The Conversation (US), USA Today, The Washington Post, The Activist History Review, The Tennessean, Papers in Applied Geography, Social & Cultural Geography, and FOCUS on Geography.
brasher_jordan@columbusstate.edu
Katrina Finkelstein
Katrina Finkelstein is a PhD student in Geography at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research interests include public memory, heritage tourism, and critical place naming. She holds a MS in Historic Preservation from Eastern Michigan University, where she focused on heritage interpretation and museum practice. Before starting her PhD, Katrina worked as a museum professional.
Expertise: Heritage Tourism, Historic Preservation, Geographies of Memory
Contact: kfinkels@vols.utk.edu
Candace Forbes Bright, PhD
Candace Forbes Bright, PhD, is Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at East Tennessee State University. Bright’s scholarly activities have focused on social learning around identity.
David L. Butler, PhD
David Butler is the Vice-Provost for Research and Dean of the Graduate School at Middle Tennessee State University. Prior to coming to Middle Tennessee Butler spent 16 years at The University of Southern Mississippi earning the rank of Full Professor and launching the Call Center Research Laboratory. Dr. Butler has a doctorate in Geography from the University of Cincinnati, a Master’s of Science in Geography from Texas A&M University, and a Bachelor of Arts from Texas A&M University. Butler’s research includes: contact centers, race and tourism aviation, space, technology, and disaster resilience. Dr. Butler has published over 20 articles and books, given over 50 presentations and has over $2.7 million dollars of external funding on research projects during his career. Butler has also provided congressional testimony and expert testimony on contact centers and the US airline industry as well as being interviewed by national news outlets such as CNN and NPR. For hobbies David likes to spend time with family and friends and run and read.
Christine Buzinde, PhD
Prior to joining Arizona State University, Christine Buzinde was an assistant professor at Penn State University from July 2007 to July 2012. She joined the School of Community Resources and Development in August of 2012. Her research focuses on two areas: community development through tourism and the politics of tourism representations. Buzinde’s work on development adopts a grassroots approach and it aims to understand the relationship between community well-being and tourism development within marginalized communities. Her work on the politics of tourism representations principally views tourism texts as cultural repositories through which issues of inclusion/exclusion, North/South and core/periphery can be understood. Scholarly explorations on tourism representations are central to our understanding of ways in which tourism is entangled with issues of power, oppression, agency and resistance.
Christine.Buzinde@asu.edu
Kellee Caton, PhD
Thompson Rivers University, Canada
Kellee Caton is Professor of Tourism at Thompson Rivers University in Canada. Her research focuses on how we come to know tourism as a sociocultural phenomenon, and also on how we come to know and reshape the world through tourism—in particular, she is interested in the moral dimensions of these two epistemic processes. Kellee co-chairs the Critical Tourism Studies international network and serves on the executive of the Tourism Education Futures Initiative. She is also one of the founding scholars of tourism’s post disciplinary movement.
Kcaton@tru.ca
Perry Carter, PhD
Department of Geosciences, Texas Tech University
My research interests include human, social, urban and economic geography. Specific interests include geographies of consumption, travel and tourism, space and its role in the construction of racial identity, geographic methodologies.
Matt Cook, PhD
Matthew Cook, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Historic Preservation and Cultural Geography at Eastern Michigan University as of Fall 2016. He studied cultural and historical geography at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville culminating in his dissertation, "A Critical Historical Geography of Slavery in the US South." Dr. Cook's continuing academic interests build on his dissertation, focusing on geographies of memory, historical interpretation, and race relations in the U.S. His ongoing research project addresses how museums around the country respond to expanding geographies of racism and racial violence. Focusing specifically on African American historical and cultural narratives, the project is part of long-term study that asks, “What is the role of the museum in the 21st century?” and “How do American museums change and adapt their narrative emphases in response to contemporary events?”
mcook40@emich.edu
http://matt-cook.com/
Lauren Duffy, PhD
Dr. Lauren Duffy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management at Clemson University. Her two major research areas that intersect under the umbrella of critical sustainable tourism: 1) tourism planning and development with a focus on how power dynamics influence stakeholder participation throughout a planning process, and 2) critical pedagogy and global learning.
Her research in tourism planning is informed by a social justice paradigm emphasis on gender and Race in tourism and how power influences the distribution of tourism impacts (i.e., understanding who benefits from tourism development projects). Her work has focused on rural communities in South and North Carolina, as well as contexts in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. She is also engaged in research exploring ways to help students to think critically and ethically, while fostering a sense of responsibility to address the grand social and environmental challenges of our time.
lduffy@clemson.edu
Steve Hanna, PhD
Stephen P. Hanna, Professor of Geography at the University of Mary Washington and Fellow of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), holds a Ph.D. (1997) in geography from the University of Kentucky, an M.A. (1992) in geography from the University of Vermont, and a B.A. (1987) in geography from Clark University. He is a human geographer who has been recognized for his research on heritage tourism landscapes, race and the politics of memory, and cartography. His published works on these topics include the co-edited books Mapping Tourism (2003) and Social Memory and Heritage Tourism Research Methodologies (2015). He has also written or co-written numerous articles, often with UMW students, that have appeared in Progress in Human Geography, Social and Cultural Geography, Cartographica, the Journal of Heritage Tourism, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, Historical Geography, Urban Geography,and the Southeastern Geographer. Dr. Hanna is also the Cartography Editor for the AAG and has, along with his students, have prepared more than 100 maps for publication in academic books and journals as well as for news outlets such as the Washington Postand the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Patrick Holladay, PhD
Patrick J. Holladay, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the School of Hospitality, Sport and Tourism Management at Troy University. His research interests focus on sustainability science, social-ecological resilience, and community development. His work is conducted largely through the lens of tourism but crosses into areas like food security, natural resources and faith/spirituality.
pholladay@troy.edu
Leah Joyner, PhD Student
Leah Joyner is a PhD student and teaching and research assistant in the Parks, Recreation, and Tourism department at the University of Utah. Her research is centered in food justice, sustainable tourism, agritourism, and additional food related recreation and leisure experiences. Leah has previously worked with farmers and tourism industry partners on agritourism development projects both in the US and internationally and has been involved in a variety of research projects regarding ethical and sustainable food production, urban agriculture, community food access, and rural tourism. Her current research focuses on the potential for tourism and leisure activities to serve as critical tools in the pursuit of racial equity and social justice in food systems.
leah.joyner@utah.edu
Carol Kline, PhD
Co-Founder
Carol is in the Hospitality and Tourism Management program at Appalachian State University. Her research interests focus broadly on tourism sustainability but her recent work has focused on animal welfare in tourism.
klinecs@appstate.edu
Dominic Lapointe, PhD
Dominic Lapointe is a professor in the Department of Urban and Tourism Studies at Université du Québec à Montréal. He hold the Chaire de recherche sur les dynamiques touristiques et les relations socioterritoriales and leaders of the Groupe de recherche et d’intervention tourisme territoire et société (GRITTS) at UQAM. Dominic is chairing of the Critical Tourism Studies North America conference in 2020 and will be editor in chief of the journal Téoros – Revue de recherche en tourisme by summer 2020. His work explores the production of tourism space and its role in the capitalist system expansion and its biopolitical dimensions. Its latest research looks at climate change, social innovations, indigeneity and critical perspective in tourism studies.
lapointe.dominic@uqam.ca
Cliff Lewis, PhD
Clifford is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Marketing at Charles Sturt University. His research focuses on inclusivity within a rural context – specifically considering the LGBTQI+ community. Prior to commencing his academic career, he was the Head of State (NSW) for a global market research company. In that role, he has worked on projects related to regional tourism products, experience and campaign development as well as destination planning. He has completed a PhD in Marketing from the University of Wollongong focusing on destination branding.
cllewis@csu.edu.au
Arnold Modlin, PhD
Dr. Modlin is an Assistant Professor of Geography and the Director of International Studies, Service Learning and Civic Engagement at Norfolk State University. He is a cultural and historical geographer who researches the connections of memory, emotions and senses in making and reinforcing racial identities at museums and historic places in the U.S. South and the Caribbean. While seeing race as a social construct, Dr. Modlin sees racism as a reality with sharp teeth. He is currently focusing his scholarly and activist efforts on dissecting and challenging the ways in which racism is recreated and reinforced despite seeming advances in civil and personal rights.
Larissa Neuburger, PhD Student
Larissa Neuburger is a PhD student and teaching assistant at the Department of Tourism, Hospitality & Event Management at the University of Florida. Her research interest includes tourist experience, e-tourism, immersive technologies and in particular Augmented Reality as a support tool for the interpretation of museums and historic sites in the context of heritage tourism. Larissa is originally from Salzburg, Austria where she has worked together with cultural heritage museums and concentration camp museums. For her dissertation she focuses on how Augmented Reality can be used as a tool for the interpretation of historic sites in the context of slavery tourism. In particular, her dissertation examines the aspects of spatial presence, cognitive and affective interpretation evaluation and learning experience.
l.neuburger@ufl.edu
Amy Potter, PhD
Amy E. Potter has a Ph.D. in Geography from Louisiana State University. She is an Assistant Professor in Geography in the Department of Geology and Geography at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia. Most of her research connects to the larger themes of cultural justice and Black Geographies in the Caribbean and U.S. South where she has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork. On the island of Barbuda, she explored the complex relationship between transnational migrants to their common property, while also examining how tourism is transforming Barbudan’s sense of place. Her most recent research examines racialized heritage landscapes in the U.S. South, particularly at plantations and urban house museums. She has published in the Geographical Review, Journal of Heritage Tourism, Historical Geography, Island Studies Journal, and The Southeastern Geographer. She is also a co-editor of Social Memory and Heritage Tourism Methodologies(Routledge).
amypotter@georgiasouthern.edu
Emma Walcott-Wilson, PhD
Emma Walcott-Wilson has a PhD in Geography from the University of Tennessee. She started her research on heritage tourism during her MA program at the University of Missouri and continued to focus on tour guide experiences and narrative formation in her recently completed doctoral dissertation entitled: Tour guides as place-makers: Emotional labor, plantation aesthetics, and interpretations of slavery in South Carolina. During her time as a research assistant and RESET fellow, she has conducted extensive qualitative fieldwork at historic house museums and tourist plantations. Emma worked as a museum professional for five years before starting her doctorate and is especially enthusiastic about building connections between people who work at historic sites and museums and those who conduct research in the area of public history and interpretation.
ewalcot1@vols.utk.edu
Lydia Warren, PhD Candidate
Lydia Warren is a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia in Critical and Comparative Music Studies. She also holds an M.A. in Music from the University of Virginia and a Certificate in Ethnomusicology from the Five College Consortium. Warren uses archival and ethnographic research to show the lived experience of performing and working on Beale Street, a blues music tourist destination and the most visited tourist attraction in Tennessee. As both a professional musician and a scholar, she is passionate about advocacy and equity in tourism and music. In 2019, Warren worked with the Downtown Memphis Commission and Beale Street Management to secure discounted parking for Beale Street musicians, and she is working on a born-digital archive that showcases and preserves the stories of Beale Street musicians in their own words.
lkw2eq@virginia.edu
Nigel Morgan, PhD
Nigel Morgan is Professor of Social Sustainability at the University of Surrey’s School of Hospitality and Tourism Management and a Sustainability Fellow in its new Institute for Sustainability. He researches on the connections between inclusion, social justice, and the visitor economy and on the development of sustainable, resilient places that promote wellbeing and human flourishing for visitors and residents. His most recent research projects and publications focus on ageing and tourism experiences, and on stakeholder engagement in place management.