Di Giovine, an anthropologist completing his doctorate at the University of Chicago and currently conducting research in Italy, spoke at an international conference on heritage and tourism in Quebec City, Canada earlier this month. His influential book on the “heritage-scape” had just been praised by the conference’s keynote speaker, so Di Giovine’s sessions were packed.

Di Giovine has been a research fellow at Slover Linett Strategies since 2008, and before beginning his leave in Italy he led many of the firm’s ethnographic audience studies.

He attended the first UNESCO-UNITWIN World Heritage and Tourism Development conference June 2–4 in Quebec City, Canada, which will be the first in a biennial series of meetings bringing academics and practitioners from around the world together to discuss heritage management and tourism development initiatives associated with UNESCO’s World Heritage sites.

Di Giovine presented a new theoretical framework for managing and evaluating heritage sites and revitalization initiatives, which he had introduced in a paper published last year in the Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events. He also presented from his book, The Heritage-scape: UNESCO, World Heritage and Tourism, at a separate session.

“It’s not every day that the keynote speaker points everyone to your book,” Di Giovine says, referring to the unexpected endorsement by Mike Robinson, director of the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change at Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK. “And many people had already read the book, which made the discussions much richer.”

Di Giovine plans to return from Italy at the end of the year. More information is available at his website, and he can be reached by email here.
 

Category: General