Rate My Professor Hazel Tucker

Professor Hazel Tucker is a Professor in the Department of Tourism at the University of Otago's Otago Business School, where she joined in January 2000. Originally from Edinburgh, she holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Durham, UK. Prior to her academic career in New Zealand, she taught English to speakers of other languages in Turkey, Singapore, and Japan. At Otago, she serves as Master's/DipGrad Programme Co-ordinator and teaches research methodologies, tourist culture, and critical tourism studies. She also holds a Visiting Researcher position at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, is Co-Vice President of the International Sociological Association Research Committee 50 on International Tourism, an Associate Member of Equality in Tourism, and serves on the editorial boards of ten international tourism journals. She is a member of the University of Otago's 'Performance of the Real' interdisciplinary research theme and the Middle East and Islamic Studies Aotearoa research group.

Professor Tucker's research focuses on tourism's influences on socio-cultural relationships and change, with longitudinal ethnographic studies in Göreme, Cappadocia, Turkey, a World Heritage cultural tourism site. Her key publications include the books Living with Tourism: Negotiating Identity in a Turkish Village (Routledge, 2003) and Tourism and the Spectre of Unlimited Change: Living With Tourism in a Turkish Village Revisited (Routledge, 2024), as well as edited volumes such as Tourism and Postcolonialism (Routledge, 2004, with M. Hall), Commercial Homes in Tourism: An International Perspective (Routledge, 2009, with P. Lynch and A. McIntosh), and Tourism Paradoxes: Contradictions, Controversies and Challenges (Channel View Publications, 2021, with E. Çakmak and K. Hollinshead). Other notable works encompass articles on tourism and postcolonialism (664 citations), gender and poverty reduction in tourism (333 citations), and empathy in tourism (217 citations). She has received the University of Otago Teaching Excellence Award in 2020 and the Ako Aotearoa Award for Sustained Excellence in Tertiary Teaching in 2021, recognizing her collaborative teaching approach that fosters empathetic awareness, challenges Western-centric practices, and promotes global citizenship.