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Staff Profile

Dr Michael A. Crang, BA (Cantab), PhD (Bristol)

Telephone: +44 (0) 191 33 41899
Fax: +44 (0)191 33 41801
Room number: 411

Contact (email at m.a.crang@durham.ac.uk)

Biography

Mike Crang's interests lie in the field of cultural geography. He has worked extensively on the relationship of social memory and identity. Within this he focused empirically upon on practices of public and oral history, photography and museums looking especially at examples in the UK and Sweden. This interest feeds into looking at what people make of museums and landscapes and thus the study of tourism more generally. He has an edited collection on this theme that was published this Autumn (Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities, edited with Pau Obrador and Penny Travlou, Ashgate) and a previous collection ('Tourism: between place and performance', with Simon Coleman, Berghahn 2002) as well as co-editing the journal 'Tourist Studies'. He is currrently working on the intersection of film, photography and tourism - through a case study using Captain Corelli and Cephallonia.

From the angle of visual aesthetics and senses of temporality and rhythm, he has become interested in issues of dereliction and decay and is a collaborator on the ESRC project 'The Waste of the World'.

He is also interested in more abstract issues regarding time-space, action and temporality and co-edited the journal Time & Society from 1997 to 2006. His interests in this area led to a collection on spatiality and social theory ('Thinking Space', edited with Nigel Thrift). The other strand to his work is the analysis of transformations of space and time through electronic technologies, with specific work based around Singapore's 'Wired City' initiative and the 'digital divide' in UK cities. He completed an ESRC project on 'Multi-Speed Cities and the Logistics of Daily Life' with Steve Graham and is now working on the notion of a 'sentient city' and the politics of new forms of visualisation and locative computing.

In the wider discipline he has is a senior co-editor of the recently published International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography (2009, Elsevier) and the forthcoming Sage Encyclopaedia of Urban Studies (with Ray Hutchison, Bob Beauregard and Manuel Aalbers), while being on the editorial board of Environment & Planning A. Within the department he has been Chair of the IT committee, Director of the Geography and Cities degree programme and Director of Research (2003-6, 2008-).

Research Groups

Research Projects

Research Interests

  • Construction of identity
  • Critical theory
  • Cultural geographies
  • Heritage tourism
  • Information society
  • Qualitative methods
  • Swedish heritage
  • Waste, globalisation and aesthetics

Selected Publications

Books: authored

Books: edited

  • Delyser, D., Herbert, S., Aitken, S. Crang, M. & McDowell L. The Handbook of Qualitative Geography.. London Sage; 2010. (Additional information) (View publication online)
  • Obrador, P, Crang, M & Travlou, P Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities. Farnham: Ashgate; 2009. (Additional information) (View publication online)
  • Kitchin, R, Thrift, N, Castree, N, Crang, M, Domosh, M, Anderson, K, Cloke, P, Crampton, J, Graham, B, Hadjimichalis, C, Hubbard, P, Kearns, R, Kwan, M-P, Lees, L, McLafferty, S, Paasi, A, Philo, C, Sidaway, J, Willis, K & Yeung, H International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Oxford: Elsevier; 2009. (Additional information) (View publication online)
  • Coleman, S. & Crang,M. Tourism: Between Place and Performance. Oxford: Berghahn; 2002. (Additional information)
  • Crang, M. & Thrift, N. Thinking Space. Routledge; 2000. (Additional information)
  • Crang, M., Crang, P. & May, J. Virtual Geographies: bodies, spaces, relations. London: Routledge; 1999. (Additional information)

Edited works: contributions

  • Crang, M. home@Singapore.world: Spatial Imaginaries of a Mediated World. In: Döring,Jörg & Thielmann, Tristan Mediengeographie: Theorie - Analyse -Diskussion. Bielefeld: Transcript verlag; 2009:539-564. (Additional information) (View publication online)
  • Crang, M. Spaces in Theory, Spaces in History and Spatial Historiographies. In: Kümin, B. Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe. Farnham: Ashgate; 2009:249-265. (Additional information) (View publication online)
  • Crang, M & Travlou, P The Island that was not there: producing Corelli’s island, staging Kefalonia. In: Obrador, P, Crang, M & Travlou, P Cultures of Mass tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities. Farnham Ashgate; 2009:75-90. (Additional information) (View publication online)
  • Crang, M. A. Circulation and Emplacement: the hollowed out performance of tourism. In: Minca, C. & Oakes, T. Travels in Paradox: remapping tourism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield; 2006:47-64. (Additional information) (View publication online)
  • Crang, M. Time space. In: Cloke, P. & Johnston, R. Spaces of geographical thought deconstructing human geography's binaries. London: Sage Publications; 2005:199-217. (Additional information) (View publication online)
  • Crang, M. Cultural Geographies of Tourism. In: Lew, A., Williams, A. & Hall, C.M. A Companion to Tourism. Oxford: Blackwells; 2004:74-84. (Additional information) (View publication online)
  • Crang, M. Placing Jane Austen, displacing England touring between book, history and nation. In: Pucci, S. & Thompson, J. Jane Austen and Co. remaking the past in contemporary culture. New York: State University of New York Press; 2003:111-132. (Additional information) (View publication online)

Journal papers: academic

Show all publications

Related Links

Media Contacts

Available for media contact about:

  • Landscape & buildings: heritage interpretation
  • Europe: Language, literature & culture: Sweden
  • Regional Heritage: heritage interpretation
  • Regional Heritage: museums
  • Computers: information society
  • Tourism research: heritage interpretation
  • Tourism research: museums
  • Geography: Globalisation, waste and value
  • Visual culture: Globalisation, waste and value
  • Regional Affairs: Globalisation, waste and value
  • Regional Heritage: Globalisation, waste and value
  • Tourism, Leisure & Sport: Globalisation, waste and value
  • Tourism research: Globalisation, waste and value

Grants Awarded and Grant Applications

  • 2006: The Waste of the World: ESRC co-investigator
  • 2004: British Academy Commodifying Captain Corelli’s Island: the visual aesthetics of film-based tourism, £4915
  • 2000: ESRC grant Multi-speed cities and the Logistics of Daily Life‚ with S. Graham, part of the E-society programme, £70,000
  • 1999: British Academy South East Asian Studies grant, for fieldwork on information and communication technologies in Singapore, £4,300
  • 1997: Dalarna Research Institute (Dalarnas Forskingråd), Sweden; grant for work on hembygdsföreningen as part of project Changing European Landscapes and Identities: the homeland movement and regional heritage, SEK 25,000.

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