Teaching team

Nancy Duxbury, PhD, is a Senior Researcher and Coordinator of the interdisciplinary Thematic Line on Urban Cultures, Sociabilities, and Participation at the Centre for Social Studies (CES), Coordinator of the CES CREATOUR Observatory at CES, and a member of the European Expert Network on Culture (EENC). She was the Principal Investigator of “CREATOUR: Creative Tourism Destination Development in Small Cities and Rural Areas” (2016-2020), a national research-and-application project that aims to catalyze and develop creative tourism in small cities and rural areas across four regions of Portugal, and European Consultant to the policy dialogue project, “Cultural Mapping, Planning and Impact Assessment for Sustainable and Just Urban Development,” developed by the African Centre for Cities and the SA-EU Dialogue Facility, Cape Town, South Africa. She is also lead of the CES team of the H2020 project “UNCHARTED: Understanding, Capturing and Fostering the Societal Value of Culture” (2020-2023), coordinated by the University of Barcelona. Her research interests include culture in local sustainable development; culture-based development models in smaller communities; culture-based creative tourism strategies; and cultural mapping approaches to understand and articulate place. Edited books: Animation of Public Space through the Arts: Toward More Sustainable Communities (2013), Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry (2015), Culture and Sustainability in European Cities: Imagining Europolis (2015), Cultural Policies for Sustainable Development (2018), Artistic Approaches to Cultural Mapping: Activating Imaginaries and Means of Knowing (2018), A Research Agenda for Creative Tourism (2019), Creative Tourism: Activating Cultural Resources and Engaging Creative Travellers (2021), and Cultural Sustainability, Tourism, and Development: (Re)articulations in Tourism Contexts (2021).

Will Garrett-Petts, PhD, is Professor of English, Rhetoric, & Canadian Studies and Associate Vice-President of Research and Graduate Studies at Thompson Rivers University, Canada. His recent books and catalogues include Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry (2015); Whose Culture is it, Anyway? Community Engagement in Small Cities (2014); Writing about Literature (2nd ed. 2013); Imaging Place (2009); Artists’ Statements and the Nature of Artistic Inquiry (2007); The Small Cities Book: On the Cultural Future of Small Cities (2005); and PhotoGraphic Encounters: The Edges and Edginess of Reading Prose Pictures and Visual Fictions (2000). He is Series Editor (with Nancy Duxbury) for the “Small Cities: Sustainability in Community and Cultural Engagement” book series (University of Calgary Press). His research explores questions of visual and verbal culture, cultural and vernacular mapping, and the artistic animation of small cities. He also has a special interest in the theory and practice of including students in undergraduate research. Garrett-Petts co-edited Artistic Approaches to Cultural Mapping (2019 from Routledge).

Shamila Rahim is a cultural worker who has been involved with the arts, culture and heritage sector for over 30 years. Her interests are in understanding and using arts, culture and heritage as agents to facilitate mindset change which can empower the individual to voice and become active in creating positive narratives of themselves and society as a whole. Her more recent work on cultural mapping has provided an opportunity to bring together all of her past experience as a means of creating a deeper understanding of the value that individuals have, and how as a collective small and large problems can be solved while also addressing issues of mental health. Sustainability requires constant and active engagement with all members of society. She is a member for Prestwich Place Project Committee, a resident volunteer at the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, and is committed to helping community members set projects, programmes and organizations to improve well-being in their communities.

Tiago Vinagre de Castro is a cultural manager, urbanist, and researcher. He holds a degree in Tourism Management and Planning (2006) and a master’s in Urban and Regional Planning (2012) from the University of Aveiro and a specialization in Management and Production of Shows from the University Lusófona of Porto (2007). In the past 15 years, he has been working mainly in the cultural sector as producer, manager, and creator within national and international projects. In 2012, he cofounded the NGO 4iS - Platform for Social Innovation where he develops urban transformation projects through culture and participation as well as projects that combine heritage and arts with community development. He was a researcher within the project “CREATOUR: Creative Tourism Destination Development in Small Cities and Rural Areas” and is a PhD student in Sociology - Cities and Urban Cultures with the research topic, “The role of cultural intermediaries in the dynamics of urban regeneration in small cities.”

Cláudia Pato de Carvalho is a Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies and Co-coordinator of the Cities, Cultures and Architecture research group at CES. Her research is presently focused on REDE ARTÉRIA (operation no. CENTRO-07-2114-FEDER-000022, Portugal 2020). REDE ARTÉRIA is an action-research project, coordinated by O Teatrão (a professional theatre company from Coimbra), that aims to develop a cultural programming network in the Centro region (Portugal) and the creation of artistic intervention projects in eight cities in the region. She completed her PhD in Sociology, with a specialization in Sociology of Culture, Knowledge and Communication, at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra, in collaboration with the Center for Reflective Community Practice (DUSP, MIT). Between 2010 and 2018, she established a European network in the field of arts education and disadvantaged communities, with several projects approved under the Youth in Action Program and ERASMUS+. She was a member of the coordinating CES research team of the project “CREATOUR: Creative Tourism Destination Development in Small Cities and Rural Areas.” She is also a member of the CES team of the H2020 project “UNCHARTED: Understanding, Capturing and Fostering the Societal Value of Culture” (2020-2023), coordinated by the University of Barcelona.