Professor Janet Dickinson
Professor Janet Dickinson is a Senior Lecturer in Tourism Management with a specialist interest in travel and transport. Her work draws on geography, sociology and social psychology to inform the study of tourism and leisure mobility. Her research focuses on adapting societal practices for a lower carbon future and seeks to identify practical measures that will enable more sustainable leisure and tourism mobility patterns. She has led a Royal Geographical Society/ Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) project on slow travel.
Her current research, 6th Sense Transport, is a Digital Economy project funded by the UK Research Councils. 6th Sense Transport is exploring how a more fluid interpretation of time, utilising mobile social networking principles, might enable more collaborative travel and ultimately reduce carbon emissions. As a major interdisciplinary project, it brings together a team from five British Universities combining the strengths of geography, computer science, psychology, logistics and digital art.
Having originally trained and practiced as a Landscape Architect, Professor Dickinson’s work revolves around an understanding of people, place, objects, meanings and relationships. Her PhD (2007) focused on a social representations perspective of transport and travel in a rural destination area. Subsequent work on the concept of ‘slow travel’ broadened her horizons to include the social theory of time and transport.