Staff Research Profiles

My research interests lie in the field of cultural/urban geography branching into three principal themes: teenage cultures and geographies of the urban environment; social inclusion and access of disadvantaged groups (e.g. physically challenged people, ethnic minority groups); urban public space and the construction and consumption of cityscapes as tourist destinations.

Since 2002, I have been working as a research associate at the OPENspace Research Centre, (Edinburgh College of Art/Heriot-Watt University, UK) contacting research on teenage cultures (i.e. skateboarding) and geographies of urban space, looking, in particular, at the ways Edinburgh teenagers perceive and use urban open space. This is an ongoing project which draws international comparisons with parallel studies in two American cities (Sacramento and New York City), in collaboration with the Universities of California, Davis and Cornell, Ithaca. I have presented the findings of this project to various international conferences in the last three years including a series of symposia and workshops I co-organised at the Environmental Design Research Association Annual Meeting in 2006 in Atlanta, in 2007 in Sacramento and in 2008 in Mexico; a workshop on integrative methodologies at the Annual Meeting of the International Association for People - Environment Studies in 2008 in Rome and finally a paper at the Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society in 2006 in London.

I have also completed a project about the visual culture and aesthetics of film-based tourism in a Greek island (Commodifying Captain Corelli's Island: the visual aesthetics of film-based tourism). This project was partially founded by The British Academy and The Carnegie Trust. The project's output has been published as a chapter in the book (2009) 'Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing Tourism in the Age of Banal Mobilities' edited by Pau Obrador, Mike Crang and Penny Travlou (Ashgate Publishing Group).

I am Co-investigator at ELMCIP, a collaborative research project funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) JRP for Creativity and Innovation.“Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice” (ELMCIP) is a 3-year collaborative research project which will run from 2010-2013 and has been awarded as a whole just under 1.000.000 Euros. ELMCIP involves seven European academic research partners and one non-academic partner who will investigate how creative communities of practitioners form within a transnational and transcultural context in a globalized and distributed communication environment.

OPENspace, ELMCIP, CIRCLE

ESALA_eca, Architecture, ESALA_eca, Landscape Architecture