Anna is a PhD research student at the Centre for Transnational Studies and Mexsu.
Biographical notes
Anna studied Psychology as an undergraduate at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland and went on to complete an MA in Transnational Studies from the University of Southampton. Her MA dissertation focused on the ideological foundation informing disparaging viewpoints on Mexican illegal immigration to the US. Her PhD thesis looks at US tourism to Mexico and the representation, commoditization and performance of ‘culture’ in English-language tourist discourses. Anna is currently in the editorial board of the Journal of Tourism and Peace Research . She has also co-launched TDRN , a research network designed to provide a multidisciplinary platform for researchers academically involved in the study of travel discourses and cultural representations in tourism.
Research interests
Anna's primary research interests focus on tourism and immigration discourses - specifically in the context of the US and Mexico - and their relation to the construction and maintenance of nationalist and culturalist ideologies. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico (in Tuluca, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato Cancun and the Riviera Maya) and the US (Chicago) with Mexican undocumented immigrants in the US and US tourists and expats in Mexico. She is interested in the tourism/migration nexus as well as in the ways in which ideas of the nation as an 'imagined community' are constructed, reproduced and subsequently imagined in the realms of both tourism and immigration.
Anna has also been involved with data analysis for the Mexsu research project ' Volver '.
Recent publications
Papanicolaou, A.E. (2009). Representing Mexicans: tourism, immigration and the myth of the nation. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events, Volume 1, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 105 – 114.
Papanicolaou, A.E. (2011). Authenticity and Commodification: The Selling of Mayan Culture in Mexico's Mayan Riviera. In O. Moufakkir and P. M. Burns (Eds.), Controversies in Tourism. CABI: Oxfordshire.