Top tourism scholar in collaboration with MU
MODUL University Vienna often invites academics from around the world to share their knowledge with our students and participate in research and collaborations with our faculty.
Prof. Dr. Gianna Moscardo is the latest of the eminent invitees we are pleased to host on Kahlenberg. Coming to us from James Cook University in Australia, her focus is on how to use tourism to promote community well-being, with a particular emphasis on rural areas. In addition to working with communities close to the university’s home base of Townsville, in the tropical north of Queensland, the tourism department is particularly interested in regions around the globe such as Botswana and Thailand. Far from staying put and researching from afar, she travels to the destinations in focus to get first hand insight into the effects of tourism.
Her research interests lie primarily in understanding how consumers, especially tourists, make decisions and evaluate their experiences, and how communities and organizations perceive, plan for, and manage tourism development opportunities. She seeks to find a balance between the positive and negative aspects where communities benefit from increased tourism without impacting their traditional ways of life or the surrounding environment to a detriment. Laying the groundwork for sustainable futures in remote regions is also of concern, which includes introduction of teaching material for tourism education. Taking into account differing factors of each region, ie. luxury tourism-oriented or eco-tourism destinations, the goal is to create a cycle of education to foster the continuation of sustainable tourism, which positively affects the local population and pays attention to the natural environment.
In her 6 weeks in Vienna, she collaborated extensively with Prof. Dr. Dagmar Lund-Durlacher who shares an interest in the field as well as membership BEST Education Network (which currently has its homebase at MU ) and in TEFI, Tourism Education Futures International. Dr. Moscardo’s research also tackles the question of methodology; what criteria and standards should be applied to measure well-being are essential to her research, in particular analyzing dimensions of tourist experiences, identifying characteristics of generational cohorts, and understanding attitudes towards sustainability and related concepts. She is further exploring these issues together with Lund-Durlacher and MU researchers and lecturers Tina Roenhovde Tiller and Anja Hergesell, who will all be participating in the BEST EN Think Tank XII next week in Gréoux les Bains, Provence, France.
This was Dr. Moscardo’s third visit, having previously participated in the Landscape of the Year sustainability conference in December 2011, and a 2009 conference organized by MU professor Andreas Zins. This time around, she recorded the first lecture in a new online series on tourism education developed jointly by the two institutions and spoke at MU’s Latest Trends lecture series on the topic of ''Changing Generations: Population Trends and Implications for Tourism.'' Based on the outcome of last year’s Think Tank XI, she is working on the ‘’Handbook of Education for Sustainability in Tourism’’ together with Pierre Breckendorff, who is the next Latest Trends speaker on the subject of "Tourism Futures in the Digital Age" on June 22nd.
Both MU and James Cook University share a closely linked set of values with ongoing collaboration and research, and we will undoubtedly welcome her again in the future!
