Recreation and Leisure Studieshttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/98982024-03-29T00:22:42Z2024-03-29T00:22:42ZThe ordinary Niagara FallsStinson, Michelahttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/203932024-03-23T02:31:00Z2024-03-11T00:00:00ZThe ordinary Niagara Falls
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.
2024-03-11T00:00:00ZBecoming-with More-than-human Protected AreasHurst, Chris E.http://hdl.handle.net/10012/201202024-02-01T13:55:25Z2023-11-28T00:00:00ZBecoming-with More-than-human Protected Areas
Hurst, Chris E.
The planet is currently undergoing immense and permanent geological change and environmental decline, a period some scholars have referred to as the Anthropocene. Climate change and environmental events, biodiversity declines, wildfires, flooding, pollution, and pandemics are changing the ways in which we engage with the natural environment – as tourist and recreationist. Protected areas, and Parks in particular, are uniquely placed within this broader context of environmental crises in Canada on account of their dual mandate to both facilitate positive visitor experiences and to conserve the ecology and heritage of a site. Tethered to these mandate positions are anthropocentric separations or distinctions between humans and nature. The first, visitor experience, positions humans as visitors and nature as the backdrop for human recreation and tourism. The second mandate, conserving ecologies and heritage, assumes that humans as managers of these places can intervene in nature for particular outcomes, reinforcing ideas of human superiority over nonhumans and nature.
Framed by posthuman philosophical, theoretical, and methodological approaches, the manuscripts, book chapter, and research note comprising this thesis work individually (and in combination) to disrupt, co-opt, challenge, and attend to concepts (i.e., anthropomorphism, affective reverberations, time, and agency) that have largely been subject to anthropocentric inscription and offer productive spaces for experimenting with different kinds of affective-sensory-material attunement practices in protected areas. The specific aims of this project are to contribute to building some of the conceptual foundations necessary for a more-than-human conservation ethic and practice premised on knowing-with, being-with, and researching-with nonhumans in nature-based tourism. With the exception of the research note, each chapter also experiments with more-than-human attunements borne of (re)enchantment (i.e., care as action) with concepts, integrating posthuman relationality and praxis with (re)presentational choices intended to evoke and affect (rather than represent per se).
Each article simultaneously engages theory-methodology-(re)presentation as an iterative and entangled practice of being-with more-than-human places. Specifically, this research draws upon the sensory-attunements of walking methodologies, the methodological fluidity of methodologies without methodology, and the evocativeness of nonrepresentational methodologies, as an embodied practice of attending. Situated within more-than-human encounters in three Provincial Parks in Ontario, Canada, this thesis contributes to the growing interdisciplinary scholarship engaging with nonhumans as kin and invites us to care-with more-than-human temporalities, agency, and affectivity for more inclusive, responsive, and response-able tourism futures.
2023-11-28T00:00:00ZUnbearable FruitsMoran, Robynhttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/199632023-09-28T02:31:40Z2023-09-27T00:00:00ZUnbearable Fruits
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).
2023-09-27T00:00:00ZExploring volunteering experiences of South Asian Indians and their intersections with community identity and daily life in CanadaTewari, Aradhanahttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/198782023-09-20T02:31:19Z2023-09-19T00:00:00ZExploring volunteering experiences of South Asian Indians and their intersections with community identity and daily life in Canada
Tewari, Aradhana
There is abundant evidence that volunteering generates both positive and negative
impacts on the daily lives of volunteers as well as individuals in the communities they serve
(Cavanaugh et al., 2000; Han et al., 2020, p.1732). Volunteering experiences of immigrant
communities like South Asian Indians (SAIs) in Canada are not well represented in Western
volunteering literature, and this gap is especially concerning in times when there is a worldwide
decline in volunteering retention (Stefanick et al., 2020, p.124). To help fill this gap, I
interviewed SAIs in Canada to understand what it means to volunteer for them and what
constitutes their volunteering experiences. Throughout the research, I became increasingly aware
of the importance of a variety of contextual factors that shaped the volunteering experience.
Adopting a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, I was able to explore the ways in which
different contextual factors influenced the volunteering interpretations, motivations, recognition
of the SAI community identity, as well as the impact that volunteering created on daily life. The
shared conversations with the SAI volunteers revealed four principal themes: (1) volunteering
interpretations are different in the native and immigrant country, (2) settlement goals and leisure
goals are primary volunteer motives, (3) the SAI community identity emerges when volunteers
seek familiarity in the Canadian contexts, and (4) volunteering meanings, motives, and identities
interact to have a possible impact on daily life. The findings highlight the interactions between
the contexts, volunteers’ priorities, leisure outcomes of volunteering, and culture at the
volunteering organization, thereby reinforcing the significance of considering the contextual
factors in future research. In addition, the study presents volunteer participants’ suggestions that
can support volunteering organizations in their work to improve volunteer welfare and volunteer
retention.
2023-09-19T00:00:00Z