1. Identify the status and the specific added value of academic expertise, including academic knowledge as well as academic attitudes and skills, for the tourist industry.
2. Gain insight into the challenges, on an ethical and a practical level, that an academic expert meets when contributing to the tourist industry. Know how to effectively combine an academic attitude with a professional orientation.
3. Gain insight into crucial forms of tacit knowledge that are required in the field of tourism.
   For example, the sessions offer the opportunity to learn about the informal positioning of tourism in local, regional and international socio-economic, cultural and political structures, and to reflect upon the, often unspoken, social skills required to deal with actors in the field.
4. Acquire some of the practical forms of this tacit knowledge through conversations with tourism professionals, who work in widely different subfields and move in different cultural milieus. This includes being able to ask goal-oriented questions, but in a sensitive manner.
5. Develop your own desired trajectory and formulate your own potential contribution to the field with the help of the invited speakers, who present a range of possible career paths in tourism: how can you “remake” tourism?
6. By working on a range of semi-practical writing assignments and through critical self-reflection, improve your writing skills in texts that do not belong to an academic genre (i.e. they are not academic articles or dissertations) but which are nevertheless theoretically sound.

This course connects the first semester of this MA program, in which you have acquired substantial academic knowledge and a range of academic skills to analyse and reflect upon tourism, with the second semester, which is more practice-oriented and practice-based, enabling you to contribute to the field of tourism as an academic expert.

At the heart of the course is a series of visits by experts working in a variety of domains in the tourism industry. Through listening to and debating with them, this course aims to assist in building multiple bridges between theory and practice. You as a student will take the lead in building and moderating these debates.

We will revisit academic questions you have worked on in the first semester and you will try them out in your conversations with practitioners in the field. This includes building your understanding of the perspectives and interests of actors different from yourself. Although on the one hand this course invites you to be critical of work currently undertaken in the tourist industry, on the other hand it invites you to investigate where current practitioners are coming from.

Themes central to this course are:

• representation and imagery of tourism, destinations, and heritage (textual, visual, on paper and online, through other tourists, journalists, operators, hosts, and in encounters with people and places directly);
• production of tourism (social entrepreneurship, niche markets, museums, tour operators, hosts);
• accessibility and sustainability of tourism (social, cultural, economic and environmental).

Ultimately, this course aims to support your development as a scholarly trained mediator between academic theory and the practices of a highly commercial, politicised and rapidly changing work environment.