Donna is Professor of Tourism at the University of Sunderland and Convenor of a cross-Faculty interdisciplinary research network on Race, Class and Ethnicity (RaCE). She is a critical tourism scholar who is interested in how people and places are represented primarily through cultural and heritage tourism, the link between heritage and national identities, and postcolonial and decolonial epistemologies in research and teaching. Importantly, she is also interested in how women are represented in tourism through the lens of critical race theory and Black feminism.
She is an Associate Editor of Annals of Tourism Research, and a Managing Editor for Leisure Studies. She also serves on the editorial board of several other tourism journals. She has published numerous journal articles, books, book chapters and delivered many keynote sessions at national and international conferences.
Donna is an active Trade Unionists and is a passionate advocate for equity and justice not just in academia but also in her local community and the wider society.
Keynote Title
Reflections on hospitality and an ethics of love
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a plethora of publications and discussions within the field of hospitality with many academics and industry stakeholders making pronouncements about alternative futures for this important sector. Many have argued that returning to a pre-COVID ‘business as usual’ for hospitality is not feasible and that we need to re-vision the sector for more sustainable futures. Indeed, the relevance of the UN SDGs is the subject of many of the narratives on the future of hospitality. While this is entirely appropriate, I have found that there is very little said about how we might understand the future of hospitality in the context of an ethics of love. If hospitality is about welcome, if it is concerned with the human touch, then what is the role of love in this context? Drawing primarily on the work of key Black feminists, notably bell hooks and Audre Lorde, in this presentation I seek to argue that hospitality of the future which is not focused on an ethics of love is meaningless and cannot hope to sustain the environment, advance economic prosperity, or achieve social justice, the latter particularly for women of colour.