Recreation and Leisure Studies

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This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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Browsing Recreation and Leisure Studies by Subject "affect"

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    Beta and bolt hangers: An Actor-Network approach to storying the Niagara Escarpment
    (University of Waterloo, 2019-09-03) Stinson, Michela Janelle
    Rock climbing is a messy practice that assembles dynamic landscapes, discursive regimes, processes of defacing, and the interferences of diverse more-than-humans (Barratt, 2012; Rickly, 2017; Rossiter, 2007). This thesis engages Actor-Network Theory to illuminate how the bolt hanger operates as a material-discursive token beyond the signification of a specific climbing route—as a representation of local ethics, a prompt of affect, and a delineation of territory. In their material manifestations, bolt hangers are employed within the practice of sport climbing as permanent fixtures to which climbers affix protective equipment. The placement of bolt hangers therefore interacts with practices of safety, route-finding, and beta: the sequence of movements unique to completing a climbing route (Phillips et al., 2012). Beta is further established, reinforced, and resisted through climbing practice in abundant, material-discursive ways. Orderings of beta are thus considered a more-than-human, relational configuration (Ness, 2011). In this context, beta becomes an entanglement of affect, ethic, and territory as sport climbing is recursively ordered. This thesis ultimately considers the material-discursive beta contained within the bolt hanger, and how the bolt hanger signifies a certain defacing of false binaries of human/nonhuman and nature/culture as it moves to translate the many tourismscapes of the Niagara Escarpment (Barad, 2007; Barratt, 2012; Rossiter, 2007; van der Duim, 2007).
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    The ordinary Niagara Falls
    (University of Waterloo, 2024-03-11) Stinson, Michela
    Tourism is a practice traditionally geared away from the ordinary; by virtue of its opposition from everyday life tourism is an act through which we see and do extraordinary things (Urry, 1992). Over time, tourism scholars have complemented and amended these conceptualizations of tourism as a spectacular practice, bringing in more nuanced understandings of tourism as a part of (and not apart from) ordinary life (Larsen, 2008). These orientations include situating the body in tourism (Veijola & Jokinen, 1994), turning toward the mundane and the proximate (Rantala et al., 2020), and positioning tourism as an ordered and assembled performance (Franklin, 2004; van der Duim, 2007). As Niagara Falls, Ontario remains a place dominated by material and discursive spectacle, I am drawn to considering the power of its “ordinary” aspects (Stewart, 2007) in the overall maintenance of its position in the global tourism landscape. Broadly, this dissertation argues that the construction of tourism at Niagara Falls is, indeed, ordinary, achieved not only thorough the larger representational work of advertising and marketing, but through the individual and collective actions of tourists, researchers, residents, and people living with/in and subsequently worldmaking (Hollinshead et al., 2009) with/in Niagara Falls, Ontario. This dissertation also argues that this ordinary work has extraordinary outcomes, and helps to locate tourism as enrolled in the further production of Canadian nationalism, settler colonialism, ruination, and state-sponsored reconciliation in Niagara Falls, Ontario. These are not new arguments, but they are arguments that I believe have urgency in the wake of accelerating climate crisis, global pandemics, and geopolitical conditions that are converging in the changing practices doing of “ordinary” tourism.
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    Unbearable Fruits
    (University of Waterloo, 2023-09-27) Moran, Robyn
    Counter to my bodily instincts, abstract writing demands we make something evident in the interest of time (Loveless, 2019). I’ve been state power, settler colonialism, neighbourhood change and/or gentrification, queer politics, homonationalism, mobilities, and placemaking (or place-taking and place un-making). Accordingly, I have situated at the nexus of political economy (i.e., neoliberalism, rainbow capitalism, racial capitalism) and “the cultural politics of emotion” (i.e., affect theory). I've organized the fruits of this labour in three manuscripts (crucially, supported by a handful of addendums, audio-visual, and arts-based components). Across this work, I argue that although "gentrification" lacks consensus definition or measure, as we move towards a more entangled understanding, identification with neighbourhood change processes like 'gentrification' (e.g., an emerging sense of loss, fear of change, felt exclusion, attuning to power) may produce an uncomfortably self-aware political dissonance, where Canadian settler colonialism is operates quietly through the (re)production of queer space. This tension is well symbolized by the growing tendency to include Indigenous design motifs (e.g., a medicine wheel, purple symbolizing Two Row Wampum) as part of the now commonplace rainbow crosswalk. In our worried clammer for cultural sustainability, memorialization, and/or to save the gaybourhood and gay bar from its post-gay demise, have we ignored the ways queer placemaking may also be place-taking? With that in mind, I guess I am left wondering: Why would someone ever want to read this document? It's grievous stuff. “Unbearable,” insofar as the relief from one anxiety simply affords another, resulting in what Berlant (2022, p. 151) described as “a threat that feels like a threat.” I don’t want to be “here” (Jones et al., 2020, p. 402).