Professor Keith Hollinshead

Position

Professor of Public Culture

Profile

Professor Hollinshead researches the use–value of tourism, particularly in psychic, societal, and political rather than 'economic' terms.

He probes the inventive, worldmaking role of tourism within contemporary society.

Hence, Professor Hollinshead is a broadly–based analyst of the cultural identities and cosmological inheritances which are deeply–embedded within representations of peoples, places, and pasts in international tourism.

Originally a 'Marketing' specialist, he has become (since obtaining his Ph.D. in the USA) an eclectic theorist drawing insight from Anthropology, Political Science, Cultural Studies, Human Communications, and Continental Philosophy amongst a wide mix of domains –even an adisciplinary rather than a transdiciplinary thinker.

Having worked for most of his management life in Australia – where he was, for instance, Promotions Manager of the Yulara International Tourist Resort (at Uluru [Ayers Rock] in Central Australia) in 1983–4, and then Convenor of the Second Australian National Folklore Conference in Sydney in 1986 – Professor Hollinshead has recently worked as Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University [TAMU].

TAMU is in fact the university which has a large global lead in the production of both PhD's in Tourism Studies / Tourism Sciences and publications on 'tourism' within the Academy.

Research Interests

While his current research interests generally concern the axial and collaborative role of tourism in the political manufacture of the public culture of places, Professor Hollinshead's long haul research agendas specifically cover:

first, the interface which indigenous populations (particularly 'Australian' Aborigines and Native 'North Americans') have with the crushing logic of global tourism; and,
second, the creative ways in which all sorts of new voices and othered (or suppressed) populations are euphorically reconstructing themselves – spiritually and materially – through the imaginal realm of tourism.