Noel B. Salazar is a sociocultural anthropologist known for his transdisciplinary work on mobility and travel, the local-to-global nexus, discourses and imaginaries of 'Otherness', heritage, cultural brokering, cosmopolitanism and endurance.

[1] Noel B. Salazar's main research interests include anthropologies of (im)mobility and travel, heritage, the local-to-global nexus, discourses and imaginaries of alterity, cultural brokering, cosmopolitanism, and endurance.

Salazar has won numerous grants for his research projects (including from the National Science Foundation, the EU Seventh Framework Programme, and FWO).

Together with archaeologist Benjamin W. Porter, now professor at the Near Eastern Studies Department, UC Berkeley, he applied the public interest perspective to heritage tourism.

[13] One of Salazar's key concepts is the one of imaginaries, which he describes as "culturally shared and socially transmitted representational assemblages that are used as meaning-making devices (mediating how people act, cognize, and value the world)".

[16][17] Salazar conceives mobility as a locally circulating socio-cultural construct that positively values the ability to move, the freedom of movement, and the tendency to change easily or quickly.