[This petition is now out of date. Please read the two updates at the bottom of the page]

CTCC under threat! Jobs at leading tourism research centre at risk. Since its creation in 2001, the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change (CTCC) has become an internationally recognized centre for critical and innovative research on tourism in the UK and internationally. Academic staff have initiated major international conference series and published in top-rated journals and publication series. The CTCC also helped create the UK’s only centre of excellence for tourism, located at Leeds Met University. And the CTCC has the biggest concentration of PhD students in critical tourism studies in the UK. CTCC programmes make a significant contribution to professional development, and offer a unique quality of research.

A pool of CTCC academic staff whose jobs are at risk of redundancy has been recently identified. Leeds Metropolitan University is proposing to make all but two staff redundant, and the management appear to have no interest in the quality of our research or our international activities. These are difficult times for academics in the United Kingdom and also in other countries hit by the economic crisis, but the loss of a centre like the CTCC will have repercussions well beyond the UK university sector, internationally and in the profession.

The threat is real and it is immediate. Loosing the CTCC not only means loosing a world class research centre which has become a focal point for international tourism research, but also loosing precious opportunities to train more young researchers, advise governing agencies and generate academic esteem through publications and external research funding. The aim of this petition is to make the university management aware of the wide esteem the CTCC enjoys within the academic community and about the losses that the redundancy of CTCC staff would signify.

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