Stroma Cole

Stroma Cole
Cole at the Gender Equality Champion of the Year Awards at ITB Berlin in 2026
Awards	John Rooney Award (2024)
Academic background
Education	Oxford Brookes University SOAS University of London
Academic work
Discipline	Tourism studies
Sub-discipline	Sustainable tourism, tourism development, human rights, gender, water rights
Institutions	University of Westminster University of the West of England Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College
Notable works	Tourism, Culture and Development (2007)

Stroma Cole is a British tourism scholar and Professor in Tourism and Human Rights at the University of Westminster. Her research examines the relationships between tourism development, sustainability, human rights, gender and water insecurity, alongside work on community empowerment, cultural tourism, labour and research practice.

Cole's career has combined academic research with tourism practice, action research and advocacy. Before entering academia she operated tours in Indonesia, where she subsequently conducted long-term research in Flores and Bali. She later chaired the ethical-tourism organisation Tourism Concern and in 2013 co-created Equality in Tourism, an organisation campaigning for gender equality within tourism. She is also principal investigator of FUTOURWORK, a Horizon Europe project examining working conditions and social dialogue in European tourism and hospitality.

Education and early career

Cole studied social anthropology and environmental biology at Oxford Brookes University and later completed a master's degree in social anthropology at SOAS University of London.

Following extensive travel in Indonesia, she established a small tour-operating business and for six years led groups around the Indonesian archipelago. She subsequently undertook consultancy work for UNESCO and the Asian Development Bank before returning to the United Kingdom to work at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College.

Her experience as a tour operator developed into a long-term relationship with communities in the Ngadha region of Flores. Cole repeatedly returned to the region to study the social and cultural effects of tourism and completed her PhD in 2003. This research later formed the basis of her monograph Tourism, Culture and Development: Hopes, Dreams and Realities in East Indonesia, which examined tourism development, cultural change, power and poverty in Ngadha communities.

Academic career

Cole initially taught at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, where her early tourism research focused on Indonesia, cultural tourism, community participation and qualitative methodology. She subsequently joined the University of the West of England (UWE), where she worked in tourism geography and international tourism development. During her time at UWE her research increasingly addressed tourism's relationship with water resources, human rights, gender and inequality.

Cole joined the University of Westminster in 2021. She subsequently became Reader in International Tourism Development and was later appointed Professor in Tourism and Human Rights. At Westminster she is a co-leader of the Destinations and Experiences Research Centre (DEX), an interdisciplinary centre covering tourism, events, leisure, hospitality, heritage and related fields.

Cole has also held editorial roles in tourism journals. Her Westminster profile lists her as an Associate Editor of Annals of Tourism Research and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism. She has additionally served on the editorial board of Tourism Geographies.

Research

Tourism, culture and community empowerment

Cole's early academic work grew out of long-term ethnographic research in Eastern Indonesia. Her research in Ngadha combined repeated field visits with participant observation, interviews, focus groups and engagement with communities and tourism stakeholders.

In the 2006 article "Information and Empowerment: The Keys to Achieving Sustainable Tourism", Cole used longitudinal action research in Eastern Indonesia to examine the relationship between community participation and empowerment. The study argued that access to information and understanding of tourism processes could enable communities to make more informed decisions about tourism development, and discussed focus groups and a tourism forum as forms of participatory intervention.

Her 2007 article "Beyond authenticity and commodification", published in Annals of Tourism Research, examined cultural tourism in Eastern Indonesia from the perspectives of government, tourists and villagers. Cole argued that the consequences of tourism-related commodification differed according to whose understanding of authenticity was considered, including cases in which tourism strengthened local pride and provided a resource through which communities could articulate identity.

These themes were developed further in Tourism, Culture and Development (2007), an ethnographic account of the first decades of tourism development in Ngadha communities. The book received reviews in publications including Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change and the journal Indonesia.

Tourism, water and human rights

From the 2010s, water justice became a major strand of Cole's work. Her 2012 study of Bali used a political-ecology framework to analyse competition over water between tourism, agriculture and local communities and the unequal distribution of the environmental costs of tourism development. The research also received coverage in the Indonesian press, including The Jakarta Post, which reported Cole's warnings about tourism-related pressure on Bali's water resources.

Cole subsequently connected tourism's use of natural resources to a human-rights framework. In "Tourism and water: from stakeholders to rights holders", she argued that water should be considered not only as a tourism resource but as a human right, and examined the responsibilities of tourism businesses, including human-rights due diligence and impact assessment.

Her work on Bali also involved collaboration with Indonesian researchers. With environmental-law scholar Agung Wardana and international-relations scholar Wiwik Dharmiasih, Cole examined efforts by activist academics to influence public debate, NGOs, the tourism sector and policymaking around Bali's water crisis. Their 2021 Annals of Tourism Research article also reflected on the difficulties and unintended consequences involved in translating academic research into policy and social change.

Gender and intersectionality

Gender became increasingly central to Cole's research on tourism, development and natural resources. With Lucy Ferguson, she developed a gendered political-economy approach to tourism and water through research in Tamarindo, Costa Rica, examining how gender, class, nationality and social reproduction shaped experiences of water scarcity.

Her 2017 Annals of Tourism Research article "Water worries" applied feminist political ecology and intersectionality to tourism-related water insecurity in Labuan Bajo, Indonesia. Drawing on ethnographic research, it examined how gender interacted with ethnicity, socioeconomic position, life stage and proximity to water resources in shaping the burdens produced by water scarcity.

Cole edited the 2018 collection Gender Equality and Tourism: Beyond Empowerment, which brought together research on gendered inequalities within tourism. In 2019 she and Daniela Moreno Alarcón examined links between gender equality, tourism and the Sustainable Development Goals, arguing that sustainability initiatives in tourism needed to address structural gender inequalities rather than treating women's empowerment as a separate issue.

Cole later collaborated with researchers including Paula Tallman, Gabriela Salmon-Mulanovich and Binahayati Rusyidi on the relationship between water insecurity and gender-based violence. A mixed-methods study in Indonesia published in Social Science & Medicine in 2024 found an association between household water insecurity and women's reported experiences of gender-based violence and developed a feminist political ecology of health framework for interpreting the relationship. Related cross-cultural research in Indonesia and Peru developed the concept of "gender-based water violence" to describe severe gendered harms associated with water insecurity.

Research methods and knowledge production

Cole has described her methodological approach in terms of action ethnography and longitudinal action research. Her writing on action ethnography discusses the changing position of a researcher who had previously worked as a tour operator in the community being studied, as well as the use of participant observation, reflexivity and research intended to produce benefits beyond academic publication. Longitudinal engagement and collaboration with communities and other stakeholders have subsequently remained features of her work on tourism and water.

Her research has also addressed the organisation of academic knowledge production. A 2025 commentary in Tourism Geographies argued that conventional individual authorship can inadequately represent large interdisciplinary collaborations and proposed greater use of consortium authorship, alongside contributor taxonomies, as a means of recognising a wider range of research contributions.

FUTOURWORK and tourism labour

Cole is principal investigator of FUTOURWORK ("Improving Tourism and Hospitality Worker Well-being Through Social Dialogue"), a Horizon Europe research project coordinated by the University of Westminster. The project began in January 2025 and is scheduled to run until June 2028, with an EU contribution of approximately €2.48 million.

FUTOURWORK examines worker well-being, precarious and non-standard employment, platform work, algorithmic management and access to social dialogue within European tourism and hospitality. It uses an intersectional and gender-sensitive approach combining quantitative and qualitative research, including surveys, interviews, mapping, storytelling and multi-stakeholder dialogue. The consortium includes organisations in six European countries and brings together tourism studies with labour law, sociology, economics, gender studies and digital ethics.

Tourism advocacy

Tourism Concern

Alongside her academic work, Cole was chair of Tourism Concern, a British organisation that campaigned on ethical and responsible tourism, from the mid-2000s until the early 2010s. Her work on tourism and water in Bali was linked to Tourism Concern's Water Equity in Tourism activities.

Equality in Tourism

In 2013 Cole and Tricia Barnett co-created Equality in Tourism, an organisation focused on gender equality within tourism and hospitality. Cole serves as a director of the organisation and has combined its advocacy work with her academic research on tourism, gender, work and sustainability.

Equality in Tourism established the Gender Equality Champion of the Year Award for tourism and hospitality organisations. The award has been presented at ITB Berlin, with categories recognising organisational approaches to gender equality. In 2026, TravelPulse credited Cole with creating the award and included her in its annual list of influential women in travel, citing her work through Equality in Tourism and FUTOURWORK.

Awards and recognition

In 2024 Cole received the John Rooney Award from the Recreation, Tourism and Sport group of the American Association of Geographers, an award recognising contributions to applied recreation, tourism and sport geography.

In 2025 she was included in the International Hospitality Institute's list of 50 influential educators in global hospitality. In 2026 she was selected for TravelPulse's annual Influential Women in Travel list.

Selected works

• Cole, Stroma (2006). "Information and Empowerment: The Keys to Achieving Sustainable Tourism". Journal of Sustainable Tourism. 14 (6): 629–644. doi:10.2167/jost607.0.
• Cole, Stroma (2007). "Beyond authenticity and commodification". Annals of Tourism Research. 34 (4): 943–960. doi:10.1016/j.annals.2007.05.004.
• Cole, Stroma (2007). Tourism, Culture and Development: Hopes, Dreams and Realities in East Indonesia. Channel View Publications. doi:10.21832/9781845410711.
• Cole, Stroma (2012). "A political ecology of water equity and tourism: A case study from Bali". Annals of Tourism Research. 39 (2): 1221–1241. doi:10.1016/j.annals.2012.01.003.
• Cole, Stroma (2014). "Tourism and water: from stakeholders to rights holders, and what tourism businesses need to do". Journal of Sustainable Tourism. 22 (1): 89–106. doi:10.1080/09669582.2013.776062.
• Cole, Stroma; Ferguson, Lucy (2015). "Towards a gendered political economy of water and tourism". Tourism Geographies. 17 (4): 511–528. doi:10.1080/14616688.2015.1065509.
• Cole, Stroma (2017). "Water worries: An intersectional feminist political ecology of tourism and water in Labuan Bajo, Indonesia". Annals of Tourism Research. 67: 14–24. doi:10.1016/j.annals.2017.07.018.
• Cole, Stroma, ed. (2018). Gender Equality and Tourism: Beyond Empowerment. CABI.
• Moreno Alarcón, Daniela; Cole, Stroma (2019). "No sustainability for tourism without gender equality". Journal of Sustainable Tourism. 27 (7): 903–919. doi:10.1080/09669582.2019.1588283.
• Cole, Stroma; Tallman, Paula; Salmon-Mulanovich, Gabriela; Rusyidi, Binahayati (2024). "Water insecurity is associated with gender-based violence: A mixed-methods study in Indonesia". Social Science & Medicine. 344: 116507. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.116507.

External links

• Stroma Cole profile at the University of Westminster
• Equality in Tourism team
• FUTOURWORK profile