Community-Based Tourism in the Developing World (ePub)

Alan Clarke, is employed at the University of Pannonia in Hungary, where he has been appointed as a full Hungarian professor. His commitment to communities has been marked throughout his career, beginning with his teaching in community education in Sheffield, followed by time with the community education team at the Open University. He has led research in the inner city of Salford and worked with the Roma community in the North West of England. He has been known to say that the best chapter in his PhD was the one on community development (which never appeared). The Derby Jubilee Community Festival crystalised a number of issues - power, hegemony, inclusion, engagement and capacity building - plus the opportunity to develop a lifelong friendship with Allan Jepson. Alan moved to Hungary where communities and festivals are constructed differently. There were hard lessons in coming to terms with this - cultures, structures and stakeholder relations have to be seen through differently sensitised lenses. This opened up an interest with religious and heritage tourism and the ways these belief systems impacted on the cultures in which they are experienced in the communities that give them life. It was here that he made the significant bond with his co-editor, Peter Wiltshier.