Karl Schmid

(PhD York University 2007)
Course Director

Department of Anthropology
4700 Keele St.
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M3J 1P3

Phone: (416) 736-2100, ext. 77784
Fax: (416) 736-5768
Email: kschmid@yorku.ca

Recent Publications

Prof. Schmid currently carries out research in Egypt and Toronto on tourism, spatial control, urban informality, suburbanism, and energy transitions. His ethnography of tourism development in the city of Luxor (Ancient Thebes) involved participant observation with local businesses and people making their living in the informal economy. It reveals how extensive tourism development can marginalize and even criminalize local residents. Another dimension of this work was an exploration of the reshaping of this World Heritage site by multilateral institutions and governments, including the World Bank, UNESCO, UNDP, and the Egyptian government. Prof. Schmid’s archival and corporate research in Cairo, London, and at the Thomas Cook Archives in Peterborough, England, added to an understanding of the transformation of Egypt and Luxor by the Cooks travel company, the dragomans (early tour guides), and travellers arriving in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.  A recent publication on this subject is "Doing ethnography of tourist enclaves: boundaries, ironies and insights," in the journal Tourist Studies (2008).

Alongside his tourism research, Professor Schmid is a collaborator in the SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI): Global suburbanisms: governance, land, and infrastructure in the 21st century.  He will explore the narratives of development and the spatial inter-relationships of a suburban Cairo that includes vast informal settlements and affluent gated communities.  Another project in the early stages of development is to bring an anthropological perspective to bear on some of the social and cultural implications of an energy transition within the Greater Toronto Area.