PhD Minority representation in European heritage, tourism and media
The Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (ESHCC) at the Erasmus University Rotterdam is pleased to announce a challenging PhD position that examines democratising heritage tourism as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network fellowship titled “HERITOUR – Enhancing collaborative synergies between Cultural HERItage and TOURism”
About the research project
This PhD project critically examines how ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities are represented within European heritage tourism, with particular attention to sites shaped by popular culture and media exposure. Film, television, literature, music, games, and digital platforms play a key role in producing tourism imaginaries: shared narratives that define what heritage means, whose histories are made visible, and who is positioned as belonging. These imaginaries are shaped not only by cultural storytelling but also by governance frameworks and risk-management logics that increasingly frame heritage sites as spaces requiring protection and control; acting as spaces of inclusion and exclusion.
The project draws on media studies and critical heritage studies to analyse heritage tourism as a mediated and power-laden field where representation, regulation, and access intersect. Through multi-sited qualitative ethnography at selected media-related and popular-culture heritage sites across Europe and its overseas countries and territories, it examines how minority narratives are framed, contested, or marginalised within interpretative strategies, diversity policies, and everyday site management practices. By foregrounding imaginaries as both cultural and governmental constructs, the project explores how inclusion and exclusion are co-produced through representation, policy, and spatial governance. It seeks to reconcile heritage protection with social justice through participatory and reflexive approaches to heritage management.
This PhD position (DC-9) is embedded in Work Package 4 “democratisation” and is supervised by Prof.dr. Stijn Reijnders, Dr. Naomi Oosterman (both Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Prof.dr. Maria Lexhagen (Mid Sweden University). PhD candidates will be seconded at Cas di Cultura (Aruba) and KORDER (Türkiye).