The ordinary Niagara Falls
Loading...
Date
2024-03-11
Authors
Stinson, Michela
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Waterloo
Abstract
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.
Description
Keywords
tourism, settler colonialism, affect, infrastructure, Niagara Falls, postdisciplinary, actor-network theory