The Department of Integrated Resort and Tourism Management (DRTM), Faculty of Business Administration of the University of Macau organized an online guest lecture in our PhD course of Contemporary Research in Hospitality and Gaming Management on 26 November, 2020. Dr. Sean Sangkyun KIM from the Edith Cowan University was invited to deliver a lecture on the topic of  “Film Tourism: Representation, Imagination, Travel”.

The lecture focused on film tourism, a phenomenon when people visit locations or sites because of their associations with films or TV series. Dr. KIM shared film tourism as a true testimonial to an interdisciplinary research area that involves work from social psychology, media and audience studies, cultural studies, geography, cultural heritage, marketing and environmental studies. He added that the time and effort that both scholars and stakeholders have invested in the field of film tourism have led to a much better understanding of the phenomenon in recent years. However, critical gaps still remain in our knowledge about this phenomenon. In the lecture, five concerns were outlined and discussed.

Dr. Sean Sangkyun KIM is Associate Professor of Tourism in the School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University in Australia. He is one of the world leading scholars in film tourism studies and co-editor of a recently published book Film tourism in Asia: Evolution, transformation and trajectory, which is the first book on film tourism phenomenon in the Asian context.