LAB MEETINGS

With the 8th edition on 27 October 2001, we concluded our series of LAB meetings, that is, for now. The Heritage & Slow TourismLAB presented more than 20 speakers and panellists and attracted dozens of participants. 

It was the founders/co-hosts Burçin Kalabay Hatipoğlu and Karin Elgin-Nijhuis’ wish to take time out to focus on research and explore new formats for sharing knowledge and experience. Since then, they have written a book chapter featuring the LAB and are working on a new publication about Slow. 

Please find information about the topics and cases we discussed and the speakers, co-hosts and panellists we welcomed in the LAB below and in the resources section. 

27 October 2021

Theme: Slow Art
Speakers:

Maggie Freeman
“Slow Art Day – History, Philosophy and Applications”

Armand Storck & colleagues
“Slow Art Day in Antwerp’s Saint Paul’s Church”

Host:
Karin Elgin-Nijhuis
Co-host/panelist:
Marc Kocken

Maggie Freeman is an art historian and museum educator. Maggie has been the Global Coordinator for Slow Art Day since 2012. She has worked in education and public programs at the Oakland Museum of California, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Asian Art Museum, and the Nantucket Historical Association, among others. She is currently a PhD student in History of Islamic Art and Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[Posted 7 October 2021]

Armand Storck held various management positions at international logistics companies. Especially during the last 20 years of his career, he worked in China and Southeast Asia, where local colleagues and friends showed and explained their countries’ rich culture and history to him.

That interest came in handy when he started working as a volunteer with Saint Paul’s friends in 2015. Together with his colleagues, he welcomes the numerous visitors to the historical church, gives guided tours, is co-editor of the Facebook page, the monthly magazine “Paullus”, and the new website.

Armand likes to delve into the church’s archives to come up with forgotten documents. These shed light on the site’s rich history and the artists who worked there. Together with Caroline De Wever and Mia Dillen, he discovered a 19th century Stations of the Cross by De Boeck & Van Wint in England, similar to Saint Paul’s Church’s.

The discovery culminated in an ecumenical project and exhibition with the Holy Angels church in Hoar Cross in the UK. For this project, Saint Paul’s became a laureate of the Heritage Prize 2020 of the province of Antwerp.

[Posted 15 October 2021]

Marc Kocken is a Dutch heritage professional with 25 years of experience in all aspects of (archaeological) heritage management, policymaking, interpretation, heritage marketing, tourism and leisure. Motto: Making cultural heritage valuable, visible and usable.

In 2007 he founded MARC heritage consultants, a private heritage
consultation and interpretation firm. In 2016 and 2017, Marc worked as Project Manager Heritage Marketing for the Province of Drenthe. Since 2017 he has been head of sector Heritage & Community Engagement at Zeeland Heritage.

Zeeland Heritage aims to integrally promote the protection, exploitation and experience of the (in)tangible heritage of the Province of Zeeland.

Marc serves as treasurer for ICOMOS Netherlands, an expert member for the ICOMOS International Committee on Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites (ICIP) and International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management (ICAHM). 

[Posted 15 October 2021]

9 June 2021

Theme: Ethical and Post-pandemic Perspectives of Tourism
Speakers:

Michael Clancy
“Slow Tourism as Ethical Tourism?
Origins and Future Prospects”

Paolo Corvo
“Slow Food in Slow Tourism:
Perspectives on Post-pandemic Tourism.”

Host:
Karin Elgin-Nijhuis
Co-host/panelist:
Javier Lizarzaburu

Michael Clancy is professor and chair of the Department of Politics, Economics, and International Studies at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, USA.

His research examines various aspects of the political economy of global tourism. He is the editor of Slow Tourism, Food and Cities: Pace and the Search for the ‘Good Life’ (Routledge, 2017).

In addition, he is the author of two earlier books on tourism and national development in Mexico and the Republic of Ireland, respectively. He has also researched and written on cruise tourism, sex tourism, tourism and ethics, and overtourism.

                                                             [Posted 30 March 2021]

Paolo Corvo is associate professor of Sociology at the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo, where he teaches Travel Cultures and Social Changes and New Trends of Gastronomy.

The fundamental lines of his research include the social aspects of food, the relationship between food and consumption, oeno-gastronomic sustainable tourism, indicators of quality of life, trends of wellness and happiness.

[Posted 30 March 2021]

Javier Lizarzaburu is a communications and heritage specialist currently living in the Netherlands. He worked in London as a BBC Senior Producer before going back to his native Lima, Peru, in 2009. There he launched, among others, the Lima Milenaria campaign, positively reframing the local indigenous built heritage. In 2018, he was one of the curators of the Peruvian pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Javier has a degree in Media Studies at the University of Lima, followed by post-graduate studies at the Autonomous University in Barcelona and King’s College, London. He is doing an MA in Heritage and Spatial Studies at the Vrije University, with courses at the University of Amsterdam and TUDelft, joining the two subjects that became his passion, heritage and inclusive cities.

 [Posted 27 May 2021] 

3 February 2021

Theme: Applying the Slow Philosophy 
Speakers include:

Zanda Serdane
“Slow philosophy in destination marketing:
 The case of ‘Latvia. Best enjoyed slowly’ tourism brand”

James Simpson
“Pilgrimage and long-distance hiking trails – the original slow tourism”

Hosts:
Burçin Kalabay Hatipoğlu
Karin Elgin-Nijhuis  

Zanda Serdane (PhD) is a lecturer in tourism, events and hospitality at Christ Church Business School, Canterbury Christ Church University in the United Kingdom.

She has designed and delivered tourism and marketing related modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level in the UK and Latvia for more than ten years.

She earned her PhD in 2017 from the University of Salford, United Kingdom, where she was a Graduate Teaching Assistant. Her PhD thesis was on the subject of slow tourism and its underlying philosophy. She has also published papers on this subject.

Her research interests include destination marketing and management, travel experiences, and tourism policy implementation.

Prior to her academic career, Zanda has worked in the hospitality industry for seven years managing a family-run holiday centre.  

[Posted 7 January 2021]

James Simpson (MA) is project manager for St. Olav Waterway, a pilgrimage route in the Finnish archipelago and Åland Islands and part of St. Olav Ways, a Cultural Route of the Council of Europe.

He focuses his work on the use of natural and heritage spaces for well-being and tourism, spaces where people and places meet.

St. Olav Waterways was created by a three-year Central Baltic Interreg project and is now being further developed through a two-year grant from The Finnish Ministry of Culture.  

[Posted 17 January 2021]

21 October 2020

Theme: Slow Food Travel
Speakers:

Michele Rumiz
“Slow Food Travel – ratio and practice to bridge tourism and high-quality and sustainable food production benefiting local communities”

Eckart Mandler
“Travelling to the roots of good taste as an opportunity for regions away from the tourist stream – Slow Food and Slow Travel as a successful model for Carinthia”

Panelists:
Jurn Buisman
ICOMOS-NL, Geelvinck Museum
Fergus MacLaren
ICOMOS ICTC, Economic Innovation Institute for Africa

Hosts:
Karin Elgin-Nijhuis
Burçin Kalabay Hatipoğlu 

Michele Rumiz is director of the Slow Food Travel programma at Slow Food International.

London School of Economics (LSE) graduated Michele Rumiz has relevant experience in the development of value chains in the agri-food sector, with a specific focus on food, tourism, and sustainable rural development.

Slow Food is a global network of communities, founded in 1989 to prevent the disappearance of local food cultures and traditions, counteract the rise of fast life and combat people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from and how our food choices affect the world around us. 

[Posted 20 September 2020]

Eckart Mandler is the founder of Slow Tourism Projektmanagement GmbH and project manager of Slow Food projects in Carinthia.  This is his story:

“My name is Eckart Mandler, 63 years, living in Carinthia.

I grew up in a small mountain village in Carinthia, Austria, and from birth on I have been very connected to nature. My parents ran a small farm and a small guesthouse, where I worked as a child.

From 1990 – 2010 I built and managed the first nature and herbal hotel with 50 beds in Austria according to ecological principles.  At the same time I developed my home village Irschen im Drautal into the first herbal village in Austria. The aim was to better exploit the potential of a small, remote mountain village in the southern Alpine region and to build on the strengths of the landscape and the people of the village.  The knowledge about herbs, the natural occurrence of wild and garden herbs as well as the desire to pass on the experiences of the older generation to the young people in the Dorf lives on until today.

My personal lifestyle and my professional activities are closely connected with nature, because I, as a human being, am also part of nature.  In my work as a tourism consultant and project developer, I have therefore been involved for more than 40 years with the topics of hiking and nature tourism, slow tourism and the connection of food and food with the natural resources of regions and villages.

This was also the reason why I was commissioned by the Provincial Tourism Organization and the first Slow Food Travel destination in Carinthia to develop a new project for Slow Food in Carinthia. Since 2015 I have been working as Project Manager for Slow Food projects in Carinthia.

Slow Food Travel was developed in close collaboration with Slow Food International and its partners in Kärnten and has since become a model for linking agriculture, tourism and the regional food trade.

After an excursion to Slow Food in Bra, Italy, in 2017, the idea of the Slow Food Villages project was born. The project has now been successfully implemented in Carinthia for three years, bringing the philosophy and activities of Slow Food to the villages of Carinthia.” 

[Posted 20 September 2020]

Fergus MacLaren is a sustainable tourism and cultural heritage resources management specialist focusing on community development and the conservation and use of built, natural and protected areas.

He is experienced in a broad range of Canadian and international tourism resource management and community development aspects including cultural and historic site destination management and marketing, site branding, training, risk and gap analyses, environmental scans, performance indicators development, site research and needs assessment, communications plans, multi-stakeholder evaluation and participation, program design and evaluation, large group presentations and facilitation.

He also serves in an Expert capacity for UNESCO, UNWTO, the Organization of World Heritage Cities (OWHC), the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the World Monuments Fund (WMF), and the Heritage and Cultural Society for Africa (HACSA).

[Posted 20 September 2020]