Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings
London Metropolitan University
Departments
London Metropolitan Business School; Cities Institute; International Institute for Culture, Tourism and Development; Working Lives Institute
LMBS, Cities Institute and IICTD: Stapleton House, 277-281 Holloway Road, London N7 8HN
Working Lives: 31 Jewry Street, London EC3N 2EY
Graduate
MA International Tourism and Development; MA Arts and Heritage Management; MA by Research, MPhil, PhD
Report
While there is no department of anthropology as such at London Metropolitan University, a number of anthropologists work on a range of applied areas in the Business School and the University's research institutes, with a cluster engaged in teaching and research on tourism and development, arts and heritage, and an emerging focus on intangible heritage and civil society. Postgraduate dissertations and theses supervised by anthropologists at MA and PhD level cover a range of topics including tourism and performance, material culture, community-led tourism development, and diaspora tourism.
In April 2007, London Metropolitan hosted the ASA conference on the theme Thinking Through Tourism. This was the first major anthropology event to be held at the University, and proved to be an exciting and stimulating occasion, attracting over 200 papers, and pushing the boundaries between anthropology and the multi-disciplinary study of the related field of tourism. Professor Tom Selwyn and Dr Julie Scott are currently engaged on editing the ASA monograph on the conference topic, to be published by Berg in 2009.
Departments and Research Institutes
London Metropolitan Business School: Professor Yochanan Altman is an organisational anthropologist whose main area of specialisation is international management, with a special focus on human resource management, careers, gender and change issues. Professor Altman is International Editor of the quarterly Journal Human Resource Planning. Much of the work by Professor Tom Selwyn and Dr Julie Scott has been EU-funded research and curriculum development in the field of cultural tourism, intangible heritage, and civil society, with a particular focus on Mediterranean, Balkan and Middle Eastern regions. The formation of a research centre within the Business School – Anthropology and the Political Economy of Culture – is intended to consolidate and develop postgraduate teaching and research in this area.
Cities Institute: Dr Leonie Kellaher continues her work on rituals of mourning in urban settings. She is currently writing up her work on the disposal of ashes, Environments of Memory: New Rituals of Mourning in the UK, and is developing a research proposal on informal memorials and their appearance, as memorial benches and trees, as part of the urban fabric. She has recently become a trustee of the Natural Death Centre.
International Institute for Culture, Tourism and Development: Professor Michael Hitchcock's work concerns pro-poor tourism, and the material culture of tourism, with particular reference to south-east Asia. He has recently published on the Bali bombings and their effects. Professor Nelson Graburn has recently joined the Institute on a part time basis. He is currently working on contemporary tourism in Asia (Japan and China), and with Inuit institutions in Iqaluit, Nunavut, on aspects of cultural preservation and autonomy.
Working Lives Research Institute: Dr Howard Potter is working on a number of projects revolving around trade unions and industrial relations. These include TUC-funded research into workers' perceptions of the quality of their jobs in mass retail and telecommunications sectors; a European social partner project looking at levels of union organisation in the emerging area of agency workers; and restructuring in the European electricity industry, another social partner project, aiming to produce a best practice guide for employers and unions.
Full-time teaching staff (anthropologists)
Professor Yochanan Altman (LMBS): organisational behaviour, comparative management and leadership, human resource management; Western and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East
Professor Michael Hitchcock (IICTD): tourism and development, management culture, museums and heritage, material culture; southeast Asia
Dr Julie Scott (LMBS): Senior Research Fellow: intangible heritage, mobility, and the cosmopolitan; gender, landscape and tourism; EU, and Mediterranean, particularly Cyprus
Professor Tom Selwyn (LMBS): tourism imagery, landscape, tourism and hospitality, post conflict social and cultural reconstruction; Mediterranean/Balkan region, Eastern Mediterranean (Israel/Palestine), Bosnia Herzegovina
Other staff
Professor Nelson Graburn (IICTD): tourism art, museums, and indigenous culture; Korea, Japan
Dr Leonie Kellaher (Research Fellow, Cities Institute): rituals of mourning and their urban expression; UK
Dr Howard Potter (Research Fellow, Working Lives): the anthropology of memorials and knowledge production, and the representation of the Holocaust, National Socialism and Marxist-Leninism in the former Eastern Europe. Labour relations, trade union representation (UK, EU)