Degree
PhD, Recreation and Leisure Studies
Thesis title
Year of defence
2024
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.
Biography
Michela J. Stinson is a critical tourism researcher interested in disruptive and unsettling relations of tourism. She completed her PhD at the University of Waterloo in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies, where she now holds the appointment of Adjunct Assistant Professor. Michela is interested in how stories, sounds, objects, and affects are ordered to maintain political and structural formations like nationalism and settler colonialism in tourism places, with a focus on situations where these orderings are presented as “everyday” or “ordinary”. A large body of her prior research has engaged experimental research methodologies (particularly those inspired by actor-network theory) and methods (including audiovisual recording, alternative mapping practices, in-situ affective encounter, and formal and informal archive and document analysis). Her current work thinks through relations of land, public memory, infrastructure, and ruination in the city of Niagara Falls, Ontario.
Research highlights
Find Michela: ORCiD, Google Scholar
Publication highlight: Becoming common plantain