Kay has 25 years experience in recreation research and planning – as a consultant; an academic (Parks, Recreation and Tourism at Lincoln University); and a social scientist in government (Department of Conservation). She now heads up Lindis Consulting, which specialises in research and planning for recreation and tourism in natural places. Current projects include designing a user monitoring programme for Milford Sound/Piopiotahi, preparing the management plan for Molesworth Recreation Reserve and developing a significance assessment method for river values, amongst others.
Kay has held multiple executive positions on New Zealand conservation and recreation NGOs. Currently she holds ministerial appointments on the New Zealand Conservation Authority, the New Zealand Geographic Board and the New Zealand Walking Access Commission. She helped to establish the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Recreation Council (2009) and is a member of the New Zealand Recreation Association Professional Accreditation Board, the World Commission on Protected Areas (World Conservation Union/IUCN) and the International Federation of Parks and Recreation Administration.
Profession: Protected Area/Conservation Management, Planning Systems Specialist
Nationality: New Zealand
Professional connections:
World Commission Protected Areas, IUCN/WCPA World Heritage
Advisor
Background
I work as a practitioner and consultant / advisor specializing in: Protected Area
Management Planning, Training and Capacity Building, Project design, evaluation
and reviews, Project management, Biodiversity monitoring and evaluation systems,
World Heritage Site Appraisal, Tourism and Visitor Services.
In these areas my knowledge encompasses an extensive range of conservation planning, management and monitoring / evaluation systems and training experience. This experience has been gained in New Zealand, where I was in the New Zealand National Park system for 25 years, Pacific Island countries, in particular Papua New Guinea, and in South and East Asia (Nepal, Philippines, Lao PDR and Malaysia (Sarawak), Bhutan, and Thailand, China (Yunnan Province) and Indonesia.
My specialist expertise and significant understanding of the challenges facing biodiversity conservation, protected area planning, management and training has formed the basis of my experience in conservation and protected area management.
IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, helps the world find pragmatic solutions to our most pressing environment and development challenges. It supports scientific research, manages field projects all over the world and brings governments, non-government organizations, United Nations agencies, companies and local communities together to develop and implement policy, laws and best practice.
Professor Hollinshead inspects the imaginal realm of tourism. An observer of contemporary forms of the public culture, the public heritage, and the public nature of populations, he researches the ways in which understandings about culture, heritage, and nature are embedded in travel and tourism. In this light, Professor Hollinshead examines the function of tourism as a (if not the) representational medium for matters of being, becoming, experiencing and, knowing of our time.
A multivalent thinker, Professor Hollinshead examines tourism from a wide range of perspectives, notably from psychic (symbolic), societal, and political vantage points, rather than in ‘economic’ terms, per se. In this fashion, he explores the inherited cultural identities and the longstanding cosmological inheritances which are implicit in projected representations of peoples, places, and pasts today.
Originally a specialist in Marketing --- for instance, convening Australia’s first National Tourist Resort Development Conference (Artarmon, N.S.W.: 1985) --- Professor Hollinshead has eclectically extended his transdisciplinary interests over the last twenty years to embrace Anthropological, Political Science, Cultural Studies, and and Human Communications outlooks (or should that be ‘inlooks’!!) upon public culture / public heritage / public nature. Students of Continental Philosophy and of Postcolonial Thought may also find it easy to spot the critical questioning of (Michel) Foucault and (Homi) Bhabha, amongst others, in his regular critical and sometimes postdisciplinary / adisciplinary questioning of the ways in which tourism normalises visions of ‘places’ and naturalises vistas of ‘spaces’.
After working as a County Planner in Wales --- helping manage Margam Park, Afan Argoed Country Park, and The National Welsh Miners Museum (Cynonville) for West Glamorgan County Council --- Professor Hollinshead moved to Australia in the 1970s where most of his operational experience in tourism promotion and heritage management was gained. In Australia, Professor Hollinshead worked in a variety of outback and metropolitan settings in the Pilbara (Karratha) and the Goldfields (Kalgoorlie) of Western Australia, in Geelong and Melbourne (Victoria), and at the University of Technology: Sydney (New South Wales). He was also the first Programme Manager for the huge Yulara International Tourist Resort which the government of the Northern Territory built in Centralia adjoining Uluru (Ayers Rock and The Olgas) National Park (circa 1983-4).
Having completed his Ph.D.. at Texas A&M University in 1993 --- the university which has produced the most Tourism Sciences / Tourism Studies doctorates (and the most peer review publications) in the world, Professor Hollinshead served as an Assistant Professor there, working on investigations of ‘the othering of peoples’ and of ‘the sacralisation of places’ through the industrial scripting of tourism. This work on the practices of governmentality which ordinarily course through tourism paved the way for his current research agendas on the under-recognised worldmaking authority and agency of tourism which he presently pursues at the University of Bedfordshire, in England.
Currently a member of eight editorial boards of international peer-review journals (such as Environmental Communication and Tourism Management), Professor Hollinshead is one of the Masthead Editors of both Tourism Analysis and Tourism, Culture and Communication. Having been Vice President for International Tourism of the International Sociological Association (based in Madrid) for eight years, he is now a Board Member of the International Tourism Studies Association (based at the University of Peking in Beijing, China). He is one of eight Distinguished International Professors of Tourism Studies with the latter (ITSA).
At the University of Bedfordshire, Professor Hollinshead’s main research activities focus upon:
* the sometimes destructive / sometimes productive encounter which longstanding indigenous populations (such as the Aboriginal peoples of Australasia) are having with international tourism; and,
* the projection of ‘tradition’ and ‘transition’ in the creative or the corrective fantasmatics (i.e., in the imagined public culture / the exhibited heritage) of populations.