Prof. Peter Varley

Visiting Professor content

Visiting Professor

Professor Varley is a distinguished scholar in outdoor leisure, tourism and sociological inquiry into wellbeing, place, culture and human–nature relations. An Emeritus Professor at Northumbria University, he remains an active international researcher, public intellectual and policy advisor working across tourism, cultural consumption, arts-led place-making and outdoor leisure.

Professor Varley’s research critically interrogates orthodoxies in health, economics and capitalist “business as usual”, with particular emphasis on how culture, art, leisure and tourism shape meanings of place, value and wellbeing. His work in cultural tourism, heritage and arts marketing examines the symbolic, affective and experiential dimensions of consumption, extending from gastronomy and food cultures to creative place branding, tourism imaginaries and everyday cultural practices such as walking. Recent publications explore more-than-food tourism, cultural and sensory entanglements of place, and the role of art, creativity and narrative in sustaining or contesting tourism development models. His 2024–2025 outputs further develop these ideas through work on tourism imaginaries, marginal voices, thickened places and proximate ethnographies, published in or accepted by leading journals including Annals of Tourism Research and Tourist Studies.

A defining feature of Professor Varley’s scholarship is its contribution to post-human and post-materialist debates in leisure, movement and metaphysics. Challenging anthropocentric assumptions, his research foregrounds more-than-human relations, materialities, absences and embodied practices, linking cultural tourism and arts-based inquiry with broader philosophical questions of power, commodification and belonging. His earlier conceptual contributions—including the adventure commodification continuum, liminality in adventure, and the internationally influential concept of slow adventure—remain widely cited and continue to inform cultural tourism and place-based policy.

Professor Varley is an experienced public communicator and policy contributor. He has been interviewed by NRK television and Norwegian newspapers, and by The Guardian on film-induced tourism pressures, outdoor access and visitor management. His work on slow adventure and friluftsliv has also featured in specialist outdoor and cultural publications.

He is regularly invited to deliver international keynotes, including at the University of Lapland’s Sustainable Naturecultures and Multispecies Futures symposium (2023), conferences in Iceland, Norway, Spain and Hong Kong. He has represented the European adventure tourism sector in Brussels in discussions with the European Commission.

Professor Varley’s external citizenship includes advisory roles with destination organisations, service on the board of the Outdoor Capital of the UK, and contributions to cross-party working groups at the Scottish Parliament. His academic work is grounded in long-standing outdoor practice as a climber, sea kayaker, mountaineer and trained Wilderness Guide.