Today 1st January 2025 marks my official promotion to the position of Associate Professor in the Cultural Geography Chairgroup at Wageningen University and Research. This makes it is exactly 4.5 years since I entered the Tenure Track system at the Assistant Professor 2 level -and some 5.7 years since relocating from Sheffield Hallam University as a Senior Lecturer to become Lecturer at Wageningen University back in April 2019 – moving back to move forward? The process leading up to this promotion has been filled with some very high moments and some very low moments of personal + professional sacrifice and loses – stories for my memoirs!?. As always, I am most grateful to God for the grace that has made it possible for me to function and rise through this complex system . As can be seen in the image below, I am starting off as Associate Professor 2 with the step up to Associate Professor 1 in some years to come. But just when I thought I had a hang of this Tenure Track system, a new Academic Career Framework system has come arrived to take it’s place. Who knows how it’s gonna pan out. But I can do all things through Jesus Christ who gives me strength – so I’m gona stay the course and see how it goes.

Here is how I summarised my vision on education and research in the portfolio document I prepared for the promotion committee prior to my interview back in November 2024:

3. Vision on education and research

In our increasingly multicultural and cosmopolitan societies at risk of polarised isolation, the stories we tell ourselves of the past and its role in the present can bring us together or pull us further apart. Stories matter and shared stories have the power to bind us closer together by helping us see the many common grounds we share. Stories and the narratives they create are double-edged swords. On one hand they can lead to discrimination and weakening of social relations. On the other hand, they have in them the power and potential to set a tone of possibilities of stronger bonds and a reimagination of positive social relations. Tourism is a medium through which stories and narratives of people, places and the past are shaped and shared. My vision is for a socially just society without racism, discrimination and inequality in which the bonds of social relations are stronger because of an awareness of the many common grounds we stand on – both of our shared past and importantly of our shared future. My ambition is to work towards this vision through my research and education on tourism as a socio-cultural, political and economic phenomenon.

In this Associate Professor position, I will continue to explore the research agenda I set out back in July 2020 when I entered the tenure track but with added clarity and a streamlined focus thanks to the insights from my just completed NWO Veni research project. Furthermore, I am starting this position with my ERC Starting Grant which allows me to my own research team of 3 PhD candidates and 1 Postdoc. There will also be an additional Postdoc to be hired through the Starter Grant of Wageningen University. A particular emphasis across the many projects during my Associate Professor phase will focus on storytelling in the context of the tourism geographies of slavery and colonial heritage. How might the stories tourism allows us to (not) tell about the contested past bring us together instead of pulling us further apart amidst deepening societal polarisation? It is a rather grand and challenging ambition. But one that needs to be pursued as we work towards a shared present and a shared future.

I’m sure, confident and expect it to be an exciting time of the good, the bad and the ugly because such is the ongoingness of life. I am looking forward to the experience of ‘associating’ myself to the Professors – instead of just ‘assisting’ them.