dr. M (Maartje) Roelofsen

dr. M (Maartje) Roelofsen

Researcher

Maartje Roelofsen is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Cultural Geography Group at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. She holds a PhD in Sustainable Urban and Regional Development from the University of Graz in Austria.

Since 2014, Maartje has worked as a researcher and lecturer in a range of international academic contexts. Prior to coming to Netherlands, she has been employed as a researcher at the Open University of Catalonia in Spain; as a lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia, and the University of Graz in Austria, and as a research assistant at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Throughout the years, she has built up a solid network of collaborations with scholars working in the Asia-Pacific region, Africa, North- and South- America and in Europe.

Maartje’s research has investigated digital transformations within the realm of tourism, urban space, and geography education. Within the context of tourism, she has examined the impact of digitalization on hospitality- and tourism work and understandings of home and (un)homeliness. Empirically, she has engaged in a long-term ethnographic project on Airbnb and its transformation of the home and everyday life in European cities.

More recently, she has started to focus on the gendered, racialized and classed divisions of domestic labour in households that have started to earn income through platforms like Airbnb and other tourism-related platforms. Since 2022, she has made contributions to debates in geography education on the use of digital technologies in learning and teaching.

Maartje is an Associate Editor of the journal Tourism Geographies and has published a monograph on Hospitality, Home and Life in the Platform Economies of Tourism with Palgrave Macmillan.