Collaborative Economy and Tourism

Dianne Dredge is Professor (Tourism and Destination Development) in the Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University, Denmark. She is Chair of the Tourism Education Futures Initiative (TEFI), a network of tourism educators who believe in the powerful transformative effects of education in building sustainable and just forms of tourism for the future. Originally trained as an environmental planner, Dianne has research interests in tourism and development, collaborative governance, community capacity-building, tourism policy ecologies, policy learning, knowledge dynamics and higher education. Her preference is for active engaged research that pushes boundaries and that bridges theory and practice. While originally from Australia, Dianne has also lived and/or worked in Canada, Mexico, China and Denmark, experiences that have sharpened her interest in embedded community case study methodologies, community participation, capacity-building, cross-cultural communication and knowledge dynamics in and across research and practice worlds. Szilvia Gyimóthy is Associate Professor at the Department of Culture & Global Studies Aalborg University, Denmark. She is head of Research at the Tourism Research Unit, a multidisciplinary team specializing in transformative research projects shaping of sustainable and smart tourism futures. Her research focuses on strategic placemaking and competitive differentiation of regions in the experience economy with a primary interest in collaborative value creation. Szilvia's research is moving beyond singularized notions of tourism production and consumption, and captures its embeddedness with leisure, popular culture and food production. In the past few years, Szilvia investigated novel value-creation mechanisms focusing on the involvement of consumer tribes, communities and digital endeavours and explored the potentials of the collaborative economy for urban and coastal destinations alike.