Chin-Ee Ong, Professor
I am a multi-disciplinary scholar with roots in tourism and cultural geography and keen interests in the workings of power in heritage and tourism settings and their implications for sustainability and social justice. In particular, I interrogate these and the contingent and fleeting socio-material environments we live in using a perspective I call, 'plasmatic perspective'. A plasmatic perspective challenges the static and stable view of our material and social worlds and stresses the need to illuminate the 'charges' that initiate and hold social and material situations together. I explore and clarify this in my forthcoming piece in Asia Pacific Viewpoint.
I serve as Editor-in-Chief for Tourist Studies (Sage Publications, SSCI) and Coordinator for Asia for the Association of Leisure and Tourism Education (ATLAS). Within ATLAS, I am also the co-founder of the Heritage Tourism and Education Special Interest Group. Beyond Tourist Studies, I am also the Reviews Editor for social science-based Hospitality and Society and am on the Editorial Board for Tourism Geographies, Tourism Culture and Communication, Journal of Heritage Tourism, and Tourism Critiques and the Editorial Review Board of International Journal of Tourism Cities.
The first strand of my latest research is centred on the development of large scale urban and heritage tourism projects in China's Greater Bay Area.
I am also interested in extending my work on tourism in heritage places into issues concerning resident aspirations, entrepreneurship and livelihoods in China's historic towns.