Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an increasingly ubiquitous nature of multi-media.
Centred around the concept of imagination, the authors demonstrate how popular culture and media are becoming increasingly important in the ways in which places and localities are imagined, and how they also subsequently stimulate a desire to visit the actual places in which people's favourite stories are set. With examples drawn from around the globe, the book offers a unique study of the role of narratives conveyed through media in stimulating and reflecting desire in tourism.
This book will have appeal in a wide variety of academic disciplines, ranging from media and cultural studies to fan- and tourism studies, cultural geography, literary studies and cultural sociology.
About the Author: Nicky van Es is currently Lecturer at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Next to teaching within the International Bachelor of Arts & Culture Studies, he co-founded the MA programme Tourism, Culture & Society (2018). Since 2013 he is working on research towards contemporary manifestations of literary tourism. Amongst his published research articles are "Chasing Sleuths" (Annals of Tourism Research, 2016) and "Capital Crime Cities" (European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2016), several book chapters and he is the lead editor of the edited volume Locating Imagination in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2020).
Stijn Reijnders is Full Professor of "Cultural Heritage, in Particular in Relation to Tourism and Popular Culture" at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research focuses on the intersection of media, culture and tourism. Currently he leads two large, international research projects: Worlds of Imagination, funded by the European Research Council, and Locating Imagination funded by the Dutch Science Foundation. He has published many research papers and has co-edited The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures (2014) and Film Tourism in Asia: Evolution, Transformation and Trajectory (2017).
Leonieke Bolderman
is Assistant Professor, Cultural Geography and Tourism Geography and Planning at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Her research concerns the role of music, heritage and tourism in urban and regional development. She has published the monograph Contemporary Music Tourism: A Theory of Musical Topophilia (Routledge, 2020), and co-edited the collection Locating Imagination in Popular Culture: Place, Tourism and Belonging (Routledge, 2020).
Abby Waysdorf is currently a postdoctoral researcher with the CADEAH project, researching how individuals and groups reappropriate and recirculate audiovisual heritage materials. She did a research master at Utrecht University in Media and Performance Studies, with a specialty in sport media and fandom, and her PhD at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where her dissertation, Placing Fandom, focused on film tourism and fan use of place. Her general research interests are audience practices and uses of media, fandom, the television industry, and how all of these things intersect.
