Happy World Tourism Day 2019!
Did you know that each year, 27 September is celebrated as World Tourism Day which is organised by the United Nations World Tourism Organisation’s (UNWTO). This is an event celebrated to foster awareness among the international community about the importance of tourism in terms of its social, cultural, political and economic value. The 2019 World Tourism Day is being celebrated under the theme of “Tourism and Jobs: A better future for all’ and is officially being hosted by India.
For this year’s event, I got myself involved in a number of initiative on different fronts to celebrate this day. We are all tourists and the travel urge to explore new places is deeply embedded in the human DNA. I am glad that I fell into this research area of tourism which is a fundamental social phenomenon we need to fully grasp and harness it’s positive potentials. Anyway, back to my activities to celebrate World Tourism Day 2019:
As a Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Tourism Planning and Development journal, I have curated a virtual special issue on Tourism, jobs and sustainable livelihoods that brings together 12 already published articles in the journal. The articles covers the themes of tourism’s role in job creation, livelihood diversification and poverty reduction which are in line with this year’s World Tourism Day theme. The articles are free to read and download from today until 31st December, 2019. The link to access these articles is:
https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/rthp-tourism-and-planning-article-collection/
In addition to curating the virtual special issue, I also got involved in a video production celebrating the World Tourism Day. This video puts a spotlight on the World Tourism Day and how my department of Cultural Geography at Wageningen University and Research is contributing to tourism research. It showcases our suits of MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) offering in Sustainable Tourism. Our MOOC course on Sustainable Tourism: Rethinking the Future is a top 10 finalists of the edX Prize for Exceptional Contributions in Online Teaching and Learning. In celebration of this and on the occasion of the World Tourism Day, we are offering a discount for enrolling on this Professional Certificate course. The link to do that is here:
Finally, the video that I made. In my last post about teaching across cultures, I mentioned that one of my childhood career ambition was to be TV News broadcaster. Well, it turns out my dream can still come through. This was my first experience of cameras, lights and flash and I think I didn’t do too badly…there is always room for improvement. Who knows? Maybe, this is a start of a career change for me. What do you think?
Once again, Happy World Tourism Day!
Emmanuel Akwasi Adu-Ampong 