It was a sunny day and the crowds had started to gather for the Regional Studies Association (RSA) Annual conference at the School of Economics and Business of the University of Ljubljana.
Between the presenters and co-authors were members of the Rhodes Project team; Dr Ioannis Papageorgiou, Research Director, Ms Zoe Touvra, Communication Associate, and Mr Savvas Alexandros Pavlidis, Researcher.
The Medieval Town of Rhodes island was the main topic of most of the presentations of the Special Session themed “Regional Challenges in Culture: Moving Beyond Tangible-Intangible Heritage/ Management and Development”.
Dr Papageorgiou talked about the Medieval Town “and the interplay between the actors involved in its management” and focused on innovative -for the time- agreements between local and national actors, that begun being issued in 1985 with the aspiration to address cultural heritage management issues. Dr Papageorgiou applied policy narrative analysis “in order to identify the shifts in the formulation of the local “protection” predicate and their implication in the Tangible – Intangible bifurcation.”
Ms Touvra at this special session presented her study “The Medieval Town of Rhodes through Online Media: Can Cultural Heritage and Tourism coexist?”. By using corpus methodology, the research focused on the attitude of local online media (websites and platforms) towards the narrative of the Medieval Town and its relationship with tourism and cultural heritage. The research questions entailed whether local online media’s attitude was neutral, positive or negative towards tourism in the Medieval Town, its effect on cultural heritage (tangible-intangible) and whether there was a shift in their attitude before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mr Pavlidis, along with Dr Jenny Kanellopoulou, Senior Lecturer in Law at Manchester Metropolitan University and Dr Aggelos Panayiotopoulos, Senior Lecturer in International Tourism at John Moores University Liverpool, wrote the paper about “Cultural Heritage and Social Transformation: A Symbiotic Relationship?”, that was presented at the conference.
