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About us

Karlshochschule combines business, society, and culture to create an international and practice-oriented study program.

Contact

  • Karlstraße 36 – 38, 76133 Karlsruhe, DE
  • +49 721 48095 0
  • info@karlshochschule.de
  • Mo. – Fr. 8:30 – 17:00 Uhr

Prof. Dr. Desmond Wee

Professor of Culture, Consumption & Mobilities

Desmond is interested in the moment a place you thought you knew starts to look unfamiliar. A neighbourhood you walk through daily, seen through a visitor’s eyes. A packet of instant noodles that carries a whole idea of home. An Austrian village rebuilt in the imagination of the people photographing it. His teaching begins there – with the conviction that tourism is not a niche industry to be managed, but one of the sharpest lenses we have for reading culture, identity and everyday life.

The classroom is wherever you're standing

Desmond teaches by moving people out of their seats. Walking a city as a method. Mapping a market. Sitting in on a management simulation until the roles stop feeling like roles. Across Shanghai, Lisbon, Busan and Singapore, his research has treated streets, motels, museums and food courts as places where culture is actually produced – and he asks his students to do the same. What comes back into the seminar room is not a case study from a textbook. It is something they observed themselves and now have to make sense of.

Method before conclusions

A course with Desmond rarely starts with a definition. It starts with fieldwork, photographs, an itinerary, a story someone told about themselves – and the harder task of turning that material into an argument. He works with visual, reflexive and interpretive methods, which means students learn to account for their own position in what they are studying rather than pretending to stand outside it. It is demanding, and it is the reason his students can defend a piece of research long after the module ends.

Two decades, four continents

Desmond studied in Canada, the Netherlands and the UK, and has taught in Singapore, South Korea, Poland and Germany. He has led a bachelor programme in International Tourism Management, directed tourism studies at CBS, held a research fellowship at Singapore’s National Library, and chaired the international conferences Touring Consumption and Picture Europe. That biography is not decoration: intercultural competence is something he has practised before asking anyone else to develop it.

What he's working on now

His current interests run from transformative experience in educational travel to new social contracts for education, from consumer identity and third spaces to what he calls future capabilities — the question of what students actually need in order to act in a world that keeps rewriting its own rules. If you want tourism explained as a set of business functions, there are easier places to study. If you want to understand why people travel, consume and belong the way they do, his seminar room is a very good place to start.

Every place is somebody's everyday.

Facts, figures and the full CV

  • Global education and intercultural engagement
  • Transversal competencies in interculturality
  • Experiential learning through participatory design processes
  • Project-based teaching and research-based learning
  • Cultural mapping and ethnographic method
  • Narrative approaches in design thinking
  • Embodied learning and immersive experience
  • Culture, Markets & Consumption
  • Cultural Turns
  • Introduction to Scientific Research Methods
  • Future Capabilities
  • Real-life coaching simulations (Management and HoTEL simulations)
  • Conferences: Touring Consumption, Picture Europe
  • Transformative experience in educational travel
  • New social contracts for education
  • Critical consciousness and future capabilities

Desmond supervises BA, MA and PhD theses in:

  • Tourism practices and mobilities studies
  • Communication culture and leisure practices
  • Consumption theory and consumer identities
  • Heterotopias and third spaces
  • Everyday practice and urban geographies
  • Narratives, imagination and performance
  • Visual, reflexive and interpretive methodologies
  • PhD Tourism Sciences & Cultural Change, Centre for Tourism & Cultural Change (CTCC), Leeds Beckett University, UK
  • MA Social Science: Anthropology, International School for Humanities and Social Sciences (ISHSS), Universiteit van Amsterdam, NL
  • BA Communication Studies and Leisure, Tourism & Society Studies (double major), University of Calgary, Canada
  • Lee Kong Chian Research Fellowship, National Library, Singapore
  • Certificate of Professional Development in Education (PDE), Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore
  • At the university since 1 September 2025
  • Professor of Culture, Consumption & Mobilities, CBS University of Applied Sciences, Germany
  • Professor of Tourism and Director of Studies in Tourism Management, CBS University of Applied Sciences, Germany
  • Professor of Tourism Sciences & Spatial Theories and Head of the BA programme International Tourism Management, Karlshochschule, Germany
  • Visiting Professor, Institute of Entrepreneurship, Jagiellonian University, Poland
  • Assistant Professor of Sociology, Keimyung University, South Korea
  • Lecturer, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore
  • Advisory Board & Scientific Committee, Euro-Asia Tourism Studies Association (EATSA)
  • Coach: WFI Ingolstadt School of Management (KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt), TalTech School of Business & Governance, Birmingham City University, CBS
  • Conference Chair: Touring Consumption, Picture Europe
  • Best Poster, UNITWIN UNESCO (2019) — Museum of the Tourist, 6th UNITWIN UNESCO Conference, KU Leuven, Belgium
  • FIBAA Premium Seal (2014) — programme accreditation, International Tourism Management, Karlshochschule
  • André Jordan Best Paper Award, 3rd place (2013) — Advances in Tourism Marketing Conference, University of the Algarve, Portugal
  • Jon Rieger Award in Visual Sociology (2012) — International Visual Sociology Association, for the PhD thesis Tourist from Here
  • Young Leisure Scholar Award (2011) — International Sociological Association, Palermo, Italy
  • Best Paper Award (2009) — International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, Boğaziçi University, Türkiye
  • Named among the most remarkable theses in ISHSS history, 1997–2008 (2008) — Universiteit van Amsterdam
  • Academic Award in Teaching (2005) — Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore
  • Roy Fleshman Award (1996) and Most Constituted Organization Award (1996) — University of Calgary
  • BISA Research Grant (2011–2012), Keimyung University, South Korea
  • Lee Kong Chian Research Fellowship (2008–2009), National Library, Singapore
  • Centenary PhD Studentship Award (2007–2010), Leeds Beckett University, UK
  • Youth Expedition Project (2005), Singapore International Foundation — Ratanakiri, Cambodia

Journal articles

  • Franken, M. & Wee, D. (2024). Na(rra)tion building: Tourism and geopolitics along the Belt & Road Initiative. EATSJ – Euro-Asia Tourism Studies Journal, 5(1).
  • Wee, D. (2022). Study abroad and the quest for an anti-tourism experience. Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change.
  • Arzbaecher, M., Sillanpää & Wee, D. (2022). Surrogate tourists on Instagram: An(other) kind of mimetic gaze. Tourism, Culture and Communication, 22, 169–180.
  • Wee, D., Amato, A. & Schmitz, M. A. (2021). Where do the actors live? The Chinese tourist gazes in Hallstatt. Journal of China Tourism Research, 17(4), 570–591.
  • Wee, D. (2019). Generation Z talking: Transformative experience in educational travel. Journal of Tourism Futures, 5(2), 157–167.
  • Küpers, W. & Wee, D. (2018). Tourist cities as embodied places of learning: Walking in the “feelds” of Shanghai and Lisbon. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 4(3), 376–390.
  • Sonnenburg, S. & Wee, D. (2016). An introduction to Touring Consumption. Journal of Consumer Culture, 16(2), 323–333.
  • Wee, D. (2009). Singapore language enhancer: Identity included. Language and Intercultural Communication, 9(1), 15–23.

Book chapters

  • Wee, D. (forthcoming 2025). Tourists of the metropolis: Vertical recreation between West and East. In Gravari-Barbas, Jacquot, Jović & Novy (eds.), Tourism and/in the Metropolis.
  • Wee, D. & Walz, J. (forthcoming 2025). The pleisure of coaching in HoTEL management simulations. In Clayton, Gannon & Klenert (eds.), Coaching and Mentoring in Tourism, Hospitality and Events. Goodfellow.
  • Bayraktaroglu, E. & Wee, D. (2025). Ethics and morality studies in tourism research: A bibliometric analysis. In Bayraktaroglu & Çıvak (eds.), Modern Social Challenges Impacting Tourism. IGI Global, 1–34.
  • Wee, D. (2024). There’s no place like food: Instant noodles, instant elsew(here). In Park & Kim (eds.), Handbook on Food Tourism. Edward Elgar, 86–101.
  • Wee, D. (2021). Walking with the Little Prince in Busan. In Dixit (ed.), Tourism in Asian Cities. Routledge, 226–248.
  • Wee, D. & Koens, K. (2017). 50 shades of hospitality: Exploring intimacies in Korean love motels. In Lashley (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Hospitality Studies, 348–361.
  • Wee, D. (2012). Touring heritage, performing home: Cultural encounters in Singapore. In Smith, Waterton & Watson (eds.), The Cultural Moment in Tourism. Routledge, 79–96.

Edited volume

  • Sonnenburg, S. & Wee, D. (eds.) (2015). Touring Consumption. Springer VS.

The full publication list is available on request.

Want to study with Desmond?

He teaches Culture, Markets & Consumption, Cultural Turns, Scientific Research Methods and Future Capabilities   and supervises theses across tourism, mobilities and consumer culture. Come to an info day, sit in on a session, or write to him directly.

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