I am an Assistant Professor in the Cultural Geography group at Wageningen University and Research, the Netherlands, and a post-disciplinary researcher with roots in sociology, social work, geography, development studies, international relations, urban studies and planning. I serve as a Co-Editor of the Tourism Planning and Development journal.

I am developing a primary research programme on the geographies of slavery heritage tourism starting with a research project being funded through my NWO (Dutch Research Council) Veni Research Grant for 2021 – 2024. In this research project, I am innovatively combining insights from cultural geography, critical tourism studies and critical heritage studies with passing glances towards cultural studies, memory studies and performance studies. You can watch a short edumentary video that provides an overview of this project here,

In addition to the above, my secondary and tertiary research programmes focuses respectively on sustainable (tourism) development policy and planning, and innovations in qualitative research methods in terms of decolonialisation of knowledge production, researcher positionality and reflexivity, and audio-visual methodologies.

Overall, I consider myself as an eclectic researcher interested in and deriving ideas from a broad range of areas. I completed a BA Sociology and Social Work (minor in Geography & Rural Development) with First Class Honours in 2008 from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. Between 2008 and 2009, I taught and did research as Teaching and Research Assistant at the Sociology department of the same university. In 2009, I was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship for an MSc Tourism, Environment and Development programme in the Geography Department at King’s College London, United Kingdom and graduated from this programme with Distinction.

I was subsequently awarded a scholarship for the Erasmus Mundus Master’s programme in Public Policy (Mundus MAPP) during 2011 – 2013. Under this programme, I completed an MA Development Studies (Governance and Democracy) at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 2012 and then completed an MA International Relations (International Development Policy) programme at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals in Barcelona, Spain in 2013.

In September 2013, I was awarded a Faculty of Social Sciences scholarship for a fully funded PhD in Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield UK. It was during this period that I founded the Tourism Research Network (TouRNet) and yearly TouRNet PhD/ECR Symposium series.

Prior to my current role as Assistant Professor, I was as a Lecturer in Cultural Geography (2019- 2020) at Wageningen University; a Senior Lecturer in Tourism Management at Sheffield Hallam University, UK (2017-2019); a Lecturer in Tourism Management at the University of Lincoln, UK (2016-2017); and an Associate Lecturer in Tourism Management at Sheffield Hallam University, UK (2015-2016),

In terms of MSc thesis and PhD supervision, I am interested in supervising studies on topics related to my research programmes including but not limited to such broad areas as:

• Slavery heritage tourism practices and performances
• Interpretation, commemoration and commodification in (slavery) heritage tourism
• Sustainable tourism development
• Tourism policy and planning
• Tourism-poverty reduction nexus
• Urban green space, leisure and tourism
• International development planning
• Decolonisation of research and knowledge production
• Innovative audio-visual methodologies
• ….

Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/AduAmpong_EA

My research publications and outputs can be accessed here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=abvhCDEAAAAJ&hl=en