Nancy Duxbury, PhD

Nancy Duxbury, PhD, is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal, and Co-coordinator of its Cities, Cultures and Architecture Research Group. She is also an Adjunct Professor of the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University and of the School of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Waterloo, Canada. She is a member of the European Expert Network on Culture, and was Chair of the Policies group of the European research network “Investigating Cultural Sustainability” (2011-2015). Previously, she was co-founder and Director of Research of the Creative City Network of Canada.

Her research has examined the integration of culture in local sustainable development, with an emphasis on the policy and planning frameworks that enable this; culture-based development models in smaller communities; and the emerging interdisciplinary field of cultural mapping, which bridges insights from academic inquiry, community practice, and artistic approaches to understanding and articulating place. Building on these foundations, she is now the Principal Investigator for a major three-year research and application project on creative tourism in Portugal, entitled “CREATOUR: Creative Tourism Destination Development in Small Cities and Rural Areas.” The project involves five Portuguese research centers and 40 pilots, and aims to link the cultural and tourism sectors within a context of inclusive and sustainable local and regional development.

She was born in Canada, and lived on both the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of the country before moving to Portugal in 2009. She currently splits her time between Coimbra and São Miguel Island, Azores.