Mike Robinson is Professor of Cultural Heritage at Nottingham Trent University and Professor Emeritus at the University of Birmingham, where he was the Director of the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage and Board member of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust. He is Non-Executive Director for Culture at the United Kingdom’s National Commission for UNESCO and was an advisor to the UNESCO World Heritage Programme in Sustainable Tourism and principal consultant to the UNESCO World Heritage European Journeys Project. He is also an author and editor with over 30 books covering various aspects of the relationships between heritage, culture and tourism, including 3 volumes dealing with World Heritage and communities. He is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Routledge international Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change and founder and co-editor of the international book series ‘Tourism and Cultural Change’ with over 60 titles published.

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Mike was a UK Government appointed member of the UK’s Expert Panel to determine the UK’s Tentative List for World Heritage in 2010 and has worked with UNESCO offices in China, South East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and various parts of Europe. He also works closely as an expert with the Council of Europe’s Cultural Routes Programme and the European Heritage Days Programme. Mike has worked on heritage, museum and tourism related projects in over 40 countries with UNESCO, European Commission, Council of Europe and various State Agencies and NGOs and has designed and organised over 30 international conferences in 11 countries. He has held grants from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, US Social Science Research Council, British Council, the EU and several overseas, national based funding bodies. His research has deliberately oscillated between the ways in which societies continually produce both tangible and intangible heritage and, the ever-changing ways this heritage is consumed by tourists and local communities. He places emphasis on the shifting values ascribed to heritage and how these shape and inscribe, narratives and meanings. He is interested in what heritage does and what it can do; how it can be mobilised to transform place, people and local economies in sustainable and meaningful ways.

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 “Heritage is all about the values we place on the past now. But the reality is that values vary across cultures and change with each generation. All heritage was once new. We need to reflect on the reasons why we value what we value from the past, and, what we no longer value. We can never fully understand heritage without understanding what it means to people and to do this we need to understand ourselves.”