Re-envisioning tourism with Migrantour & Roots Guide

Together with an amazing group of social entrepreneurs, artists and people with diverse migration backgrounds excited to craft and share their stories with others -- I've been working in a participatory action research project for the last couple of years that involves co-creating an interactive guidebook of the Netherlands called Roots Guide (https://www.instagram.com/rootsguide/). I'm happy to say that we'll be launching the book and educational toolkit before summer. (More details on that to come...🙂) And I'm also proud and grateful to say that this initiative wouldn't have been possible without the wonderful dedication of many of our master's students at Wageningen University who have gotten involved as interns, ACT students and volunteers.

A few articles will be coming out related to the Roots Guide project over the coming year or so. But right now, I'm very pleased to announce that the first article from this project was published today in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism: 'Beyond multicultural "tolerance": guided tours and guidebooks as transformative tools for civic learning': https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2021.1901908 (open access)

I co-wrote this article with Francesco Vietti, the founder of Migrantour (http://www.mygrantour.org/), another initiative in which I'm also getting more heavily involved as an action researcher. Migrantour is a network of guided walking tours developed, researched and led by people with migration backgrounds in cities around Europe. And I'd like to take this opportunity to also share some successes on that front: our consortium applied for and have recently received two Erasmus+ adult education grants for expanding Migrantour into rural areas (Rural Migrantour, led by Terra Vera) and into 3 new European cities (Migrantour Sustainable Routes, led by ACRA).

This is a dream for me because it means that I'll be working with a group of NGOs throughout Europe focusing on social inclusion, storytelling and migration heritage over the next couple of years. And, with some hard work and a healthy dose of good humour from all involved, De Voorkamer and I'll have the Netherlands' first Migrantour up and running by the end of next year in Utrecht! If you're interested in contributing to this project in some way, don't hesitate to get in touch. I'd also very much welcome the opportunity to have some master's students involved in the Migrantour projects -- so please encourage students interested in these themes to contact me.