Lecturers

Tjaša Alegro is a Teaching Assistant at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Tourism, Slovenia. At the faculty, she teaches tutorials in the field of experience design, digital communication, media and marketing research. Her research interests are primarily in digitization in tourism, more specifically, the use of virtual reality in tourist experiences, which is also the topic of her PhD research. In the past, she was part of the research group on the Tourism 4.0 project and is currently working on the pilot project on integrating VR Technology into teaching methods.

Filipa Fernandes is an Assistant Professor at Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas at the University of Lisbon. She is a Cultural Anthropologist and holds a PhD in Tourism from University of Évora (2013). She is a senior researcher at Centro de Administração e Políticas Públicas, Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas, Universidade de Lisboa. She was a Visiting Academic at Multidimensional Tourism Institute, University of Lapland between 2014-2017. Filipa has been, since 2015, the regional representative of IUAES Commission on the Anthropology of Tourism. In 2021, she became a collaborator in the candidacy of Madeira’s levadas to UNESCO world heritage. Her work draws on heritage, memory, anthropology and tourism, tourism imaginaries and representations and touristification. Her current research interests focus on the production of Christmas tourism imaginaries in Finnish Lapland; and touristification, tourism impacts and new hospitalities in the city of Lisbon, Portugal.

José-Carlos García-Rosell is Senior Lecturer at the Multidimensional Tourism Institute (MTI) at the University of Lapland. He also holds Associate Professor positions in Corporate Social Responsibility in Tourism at Tampere University and the University of Maribor. José-Carlos is the Director of the Master's degree program "Tourism, Culture, and International Managment" (TourCIM). His research interests are in areas of responsible business, ethics, responsible tourism experiences, and managemnt education. Recently, he has been working with studies related to animal work in tourism and Christmas as tourism phenomenon. He has published his research in various books and journals such as Management Learning, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Tourism Geographies, and Journal of Marketing Managment.

Minni Haanpää is Senior Lecturer at the Multidimensional Tourism Institute (MTI) at the University of Lapland. She has recently completed her doctoral dissertation that looks into events as co-creational arenas where different actors practice their knowledge. Voluntary workers take part in the co-creation of the event and are important actors and informants in producing the events’ service culture. Her research asks: how can the knowledge of voluntary workers be understood in the event co-creation processes? It explores theoretically and empirically how the different forms of knowledge work and manifest during the event production. Minni’s other research interests are in the areas of event and tourism experiences, tourism product development, ethnographic methodology, and pedagogic practice in the higher education of tourism. Recently, she has been keen to develop her skills in visual methodologies, particularly videography.

Philip Hancock is a Professor of Work and Organisation at Essex Business School at the University of Essex, UK. His academic background is in theoretical and qualitative sociology, and he holds an MA in Philosophy and Social Theory from the University of Warwick, UK and a PhD from Keele University, UK. His research interests include practices of organisational aestheticization, the architectural management of space and place, recognition and precarity amongst live performers and, in particular, the production and reproduction of socio-economic and organisational relations at Christmas. He has published widely in leading journals in the field of organisation studies and sociology, and has published books such as Work, Postmodernism and Organization: A Critical Introduction (Sage) and Art and Aesthetics at Work (Palgrave), while his latest book, Organizing Christmas, is to be published by Routledge in 2023. 

Maja Turnšek is Associate Professor & Vice Dean for Research at University of Maribor, Faculty of Tourism, Slovenia. Her research interests cover storytelling, humour and experience design in tourism and climate change and communication in tourism. She gained her PhD in media and communication studies at the University of Ljubljana. Her PhD was on the need of transnational deliberation in the face of climate change as a global public issue. She lectures on communication, psychology and marketing in tourism. Currently, she leads two national research projects: Climate change and sustainable tourism in Slovenia and The future of social dialogue in the platform economy: The case of Slovenia.