Christine Buzinde

Christine Buzinde is a Professor in the School of Community Resources and Development. She is also the Director of the School of Community Resources and Development. Her research focuses on two areas: community development through tourism and the politics of tourism representations. Buzinde’s work on development adopts a grassroots approach and it aims to understand the relationship between community well-being and tourism development within marginalized communities. Tourism development has been proposed by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) as one of the tools through which the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can be accomplished to enhance well-being within South nations.  However, questions of enduring interest posed within Buzinde’s research include: Are the well-being indicators, such those evidenced in the SDGs, (mis)aligned with wellbeing indicators articulated by communities in South nations? How does tourism development impact, if at all, the indicators articulated by communities in South nations? What is the cost to society of placing social welfare within a business paradigm and how does this varyingly impact the various generations within a given community? Buzinde’s work on the politics of tourism representations principally views tourism texts as cultural repositories through which issues of inclusion/exclusion, North/South and core/periphery can be understood. Scholarly explorations on tourism representations are central to our understanding of ways in which tourism is entangled with issues of power, oppression, agency and resistance. Buzinde has conducted research in the United States, Tanzania, Ecuador, Mexico, India and Nepal. Her work has been featured in top tier academic journals within tourism studies and outside the field as well as at national and international conferences. She serves on the editorial board of Annals of Tourism Research and she is also a faculty affiliate in the Tourism Lab at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.