Research profile

With point of departure in consumer, culture and communication studies, my research focuses on ‘place consumers’, particularly tourists but also local citizens, and how they imagine, experience and use places as part of their identity construction. I often combine this with a stakeholder perspective in that place development and branding efforts are studied in the context of tourist/citizen perceptions and practices.

Empirically, I have, among other things, done research on holiday decision-making and experiences of families with children, mature couples and more recently young adults and their travel-related sustainability dilemmas. Food tourism as a particular type of place experience has also had my research attention just as I have studied the place branding potential of local food.

My research is both conceptual and practice-oriented in that I often work together with various types of organisations. This has resulted in a number of collaborative research projects sponsored by research foundations and organisations (e.g. European Structural Fund, Innovation Fund Denmark, Danish Board of Business Development).