2021 Student Presentation Abstracts
Our graduate students recently took to the virtual stage to present their research at the 2021 Graduate Leisure Research Symposium!
While the Symposium is typically and in-person event, the students took full advantage of technology and gave exceptional presentations.
Below are the abstracts for the student presentations from the 2021 event.
- Michela J. Stinson: On unwieldy hope and Critical Tourism Studies
- Gaurav Panse, Alan Fyall & Sergio Alvarez: Sustainability in the urban destination as an ‘all-around’ path to destination competitiveness: From the lenses of stakeholders
- Luke Moyer: What good is language? A collective discussion on methodological confusion and tension
- Robyn Burns, Marcus Pereira & Lisbeth Berbary: Academic-community coalition building for anti-gentrification
- Hannah Mueller & Jaylyn Leighton: A tale of Two Nations: A duoethnographic inspired discussion about TR across US and Canadian borders
- Benjamin Smith: Exploring student discourses: Would intergenerational cohousing be possible?
- Eden Champagne, Taylor Kurta, Amy Matharu, Hannah Mueller, Rebekah Norman, Shawn Reis: The Last Decade of Disability and Illness in Leisure Research: A critical review of representations
Michela J. Stinson: On unwieldy hope and Critical Tourism Studies
Critical tourism studies (CTS) refers to a collection of writing concerned with equality, social justice, and anti-oppression—what Ateljevic et al. (2007) refer to as an “academy of hope” (p. 3). Though the commitment to hope found in CTS is grounded in the activism and writing of bell hooks and her critical community-justice pedagogy, it has since expanded to encompass a variety of ethical and political orientations across tourism, including those more or less sympathetic to transformation, resistance, decolonization, and abolition (Higgins- Desbiolles & Whyte, 2013; Pritchard et al., 2011). Despite the insistence on an “activist edge” (Pritchard et al., 2011, p. 952) within CTS, the concept of hope remains unwieldy.
I insist that tourism scholars must continue to work for and with hope, both to maintain and trace its necessary praxis, but also to repurpose and reimagine it as prompted by Raynor’s (2021) “hopes [as] relations of disruption” (p. 3) As a conceptual contribution following Grimwood (2015), I offer three metaphors as material-discursive paths through which we might read and enact pluralities of hope: tourism diapause (The Institute of Queer Ecology, 2020), an evangelist hope; tourism hospice (de Oliveira Andreotti et al., 2015), a critical hope; and tourism compost (Akomolafe, 2017), an entangled hope. Each of these metaphors is put forwards as a possible practice or discipline, following Black abolitionist thinker Mariame Kaba (Sonenstein & Wilson, 2020). By considering how hope works in the world, tourism scholars might more effectively wield hope toward transformative political action.
About the author
Michela is a PhD Candidate in the department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo.
Gaurav Panse, Alan Fyall & Sergio Alvarez: Sustainability in the urban destination as an ‘all-around’ path to destination competitiveness: From the lenses of stakeholders
Purpose: Cities around the world have been the epicenter of tourism and leisure activities and economic benefits have been evident.
However, much of the academic debate on sustainable tourism has centered primarily on the ecological and socio-cultural sustainability within rural and coastal, rather than urban locations. This paper, therefore, critically reviews the intricacies of sustainable urban tourism, its drivers and barriers, and questions how the cities can achieve tourism ‘destination’ competitiveness from planning and policymaking towards a sustainable urban future.
Design/methodology/approach: the paper utilizes a qualitative, exploratory research approach using in-depth interviews to seek responses from the sustainability professionals, educators, and tourism industry stakeholders across Orlando and Central Florida on their views on how sustainability is defined and their experiences of managing sustainability in the context of an urban destination. Thematic analysis is used to analyze and present the findings.
Findings: The key themes were derived from both academic scholarly literature and the interview data. The three broad themes derived from the interviews are Recognition, Cooperation, and Action. Second level coding was developed derived from the scholarly literature on Urban Resilience (Coaffee & Lee, 2016), Sustainable Tourism Development (Sharpley & Telfer, 2015), and from the theoretical perspective guided by the Destination Competitiveness Model (Ritchie & Crouch,
2003). This study concludes that destinations need to be viewed in their broader regional context meaning beyond the urban core to include “greater metropolitan area” in terms of both geographical and political. Rather than be viewed solely as destinations that are ‘gentle towards environment’. Urban destinations by virtual of their scope and scale of their operations should demonstrate a deeper responsibility to all stakeholder groups, and especially residents, to provide a fair, just, and desirable ecosystem aimed towards contributing to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs).
Originality: This paper signifies the prospective correlation between ‘urban sustainability and the ‘destination competitiveness’ of an urban tourism destination. We suggest policy planning towards sustainable cities (per UNSDGs) certainly holds value to the future destination competitiveness.
About the authors
Gaurev is a PhD Student in the department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo. Alan & Sergio are researchers at the University of Central Florida.
Luke Moyer:What good is language? A collective discussion on methodological confusion and tension
My research aims to critique, disrupt, and reimagine the racial dynamics between institutions, young people, and basketball in the everyday urban politics of Canada. At this stage of my research, I do not know what ‘data’ will best allow me to do this. At the root of my methodological struggle is the tension between linguistic and material forms of data analyses. Within the ‘Big 5’ qualitative methods (narrative inquiry, grounded theory, case studies, phenomenology, ethnography) words as text, or as conversation, are what typically generate findings within qualitative analysis. More recently, leisure and tourism scholars have illustrated the limits of words, and language in our analysis, and have offered new materialist methods as a way to stretch what is (ontology) and what can be known (epistemology) through our research (see: Kumm, Berbary, & Grimwood, 2019; MacDonald & Wiens, 2019). New materialist scholars argue that language in qualitative analysis has been granted too much power, and in order to challenge systems we ought to consider the ways in which material ‘data’, can help understand or disrupt structures (Barad, 2003). However, language can also be a useful way of understanding discourses of power in the types of socio-spatial practises that my research endeavours to reimagine and disrupt (see: Meekes, Buda, & de Roo, 2020). The purpose of my presentation is to explore these tensions collectively with those who attend my presentation in hopes that we can all think more critically about the use of language in qualitative research that is oriented towards social justice.
About the author
Luke is a PhD Student in the department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo.
Robyn Burns, Marcus Pereira & Lisbeth Berbary:Academic-community coalition building for anti-gentrification
This presentation considers the role, utility, and constraints of academic-community coalition building towards anti-gentrification solidarities. While much academic gentrification research has focused on the role of policy (e.g., affordable housing strategies), these strategies relegate anti-gentrification efforts to the same decision- making authorities that are often involved in pro-gentrification efforts (Lees et al., 2018; Two Toronto Members, 2017). Specifically, this is concerning as gentrification is commonly a process of neighbourhood change and socioeconomic shift that often occurs at the hands of, or with the support, sanctioning, and encouragement of municipal governance, the same entities that then are left to repair the harms. Anti-gentrification efforts that involve mutual aid (e.g., resource redistribution and skill-sharing) and direct action (e.g., protest, targeting landlords) scarcely receive the same attention in academic literature (Burns, 2021). The potential for academic-community coalition building to bolster attention to more viable, grassroots gentrification strategies have been scarcely studied (Baker, 2018).
While academic institutions are often (and understandably) dismissed as too neoliberal to engage in this work, coalition building encourages us to consider the ways that organizing around a single identity (i.e., typically that of tenant) collapses other interrelated axes of oppression and limits our potential for meaningful collaboration around shared politic and solidarity (Fowlkes, 1997). Where cities seldom provide funding for grassroots anti-gentrification groups to carry out related work, such as cultural preservation and information sharing, academic-community coalitions may be one way to alleviate the lack of labour and financial resources available to anti- gentrification groups. In this presentation we consider our experiences in trying to bring anti-gentrification coalition building to our academic and community-based work, in our always already pluriversal roles, identities, and politics.
About the authors
Robyn is a PhD Candidate in the department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo.
Marcus, an undergraduate student in Recreation and Leisure Studies at University of Waterloo, is a community activist with a strong focus on resistance against anti- black racism, gentrification and displacement.
Dr. Lisbeth Berbary is an Associate Professor in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies.
Hannah Mueller & Jaylyn Leighton:A tale of Two Nations: A duoethnographic inspired discussion about TR across US and Canadian borders
Jaylyn: Eh, what do we want to present for GARLS?
Hannah: Well. We have TR in common.
Jaylyn: It would be interesting to compare and reflect
on our unique experiences with TR curriculum in the United States and Canada.
*About 10 minutes after a long and impassioned conversation about TR curriculum and experiences centered around: educational pedagogies, structures of health care, philosophy/theories of care, therapeutic recreation praxis (language) *
Jaylyn: Alright so we need to make sure we present this in a way where we don’t negate either of our
experiences, rather we can use critical theory (broadly speaking) within our conversations to illuminate the cracks in the differing systems and offer opportunities for growth.
Hannah: I agree. Okay. What about our methodology? I just read this paper where they used duoethnography. I wonder if that would be a good fit? I’ll send it to you.
Jaylyn: Yeah, I think that would be an innovative way to showcase our experiences in a transparent and personal manner. We could
use duoethnography to situate our personal narratives and unpack where we are coming from.
Hannah: So, we need to write an abstract then, huh? Ope, I think I have an idea...
About the authors
Hannah is a PhD Candidate in the department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo.
Jaylyn is a PhD Candidate in the department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo.
Benjamin Smith: Exploring student discourses: Would intergenerational cohousing be possible?
Intergenerational cohousing programs are arrangements which promote contact between younger and older adults through living together, including within retirement and long-term care (LTC) homes. These cohousing opportunities have several important benefits for younger and older people, yet the stigma associated with LTC, exacerbated by the pandemic, is threatening these cohousing possibilities in the future. This narrative research will explore three related puzzles: (1) How do students story the experience of life and leisure in LTC; (2) What dominant discourses pervade their stories; and
(3) What does this suggest about future participation in intergenerational cohousing programs? Narrative interviews are currently being conducted with undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Waterloo, since university students are the most common subset of young adults in these cohousing programs. Participants include students with experience working and volunteering in LTC settings, as well as students who have only visited to see family members. Although analysis is still in early stages, preliminary analysis of transcripts suggest that students view living with older adults in LTC settings as something that would be a positive experience for them, citing perceived similarities in leisure interests, career aspirations in healthcare, and enjoying the company of older adults. However, students also suggested there were significant barriers to their participation including the perceived loss of privacy and autonomy, encountering abusive situations between care staff and residents, and preferring to live with people they know. This research will culminate in a visionary story which follows the lives of students living in LTC.
About the author
Benjamin is a master’s Student in the department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo.
Eden Champagne, Taylor Kurta, Amy Matharu, Hannah Mueller, Rebekah Norman, Shawn Reis: The Last Decade of Disability and Illness in Leisure Research: A critical review of representations
Leisure is essential to wellness and life quality for all human beings and yet, in 2009, Aitchison stated that while research in leisure studies has an established body of literature on leisure and social exclusion, the voices of individuals living with disabilities have been largely ignored. More recently, many leisure scholars have called for the inclusion of more diverse voices and perspectives (Flanagan, 2019; Ho & Chang, 2021; Williams et al., 2020). This proposed study critically examines Leisure Studies, Annals of Leisure Research, and Journal of Leisure Research, and compares how each journal have attended to disability and illness from diverse perspectives over the past ten years. The authors conducted a keyword search for terms related to disability and illness, along with a secondary search to identify articles which did not explicitly mention disability or illness yet had related themes. This resulted in 37 research articles included over the course of 10 years within three prominent leisure journals. This presentation, will address the following questions: How has disability and illness been taken up in the leisure literature in the past ten years; whose narratives are told; what narratives are represented; and whose voices are not being heard? The authors anticipate that results of this meta- analysis will both serve as a reminder that there is a lack of intersectional representation in leisure journals and to continue the call for scholars to represent the voices of persons with disability and illness from critical perspectives.
About the authors
Rebekah and Shawn are master’s students in the department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo.
Eden, Taylor, and Amy are PhD Students in the department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo.
Hannah is a PhD Candidate in the department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo.