Carla Ricaurte Quijano

Carla Ricaurte Quijano is an Associate Professor in Tourism at ESPOL in Guayaquil, Ecuador. She has worked as a tourism-planning consultant for the Ministry of Tourism and local authorities, contributing to the National Strategic Plan for Sustainable Tourism Development. Her research focuses on the dynamics of tourism and its potential for social transformation. Carla holds a Master’s degree from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México and a PhD from the University of Brighton, where she participated in the Brighton Complex Systems Knowledge Exchange Project. Her research interests include agency and self-organisation in tourism governance. More recently, she has started looking at the themes of gender and social inequality in tourism spaces, including women in tourism academia, women in the public tourism sphere and the informal tourism economy in beach destinations. She is currently leading the Coastal and Marine Tourism Research Group at ESPOL.