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 "actor-network theory"

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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.