Nick J. Bejarano is a first year PhD candidate in Recreation & Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo. He has an MA in Peace & Conflict Studies (also from Waterloo), as well as an MS in Park & Resource Management and a Juris Doctorate. Nick has spent more than a decade in tourism and outdoor education and recreation as a backcountry guide and instructor, river guide, program manager, and tour coordinator.
Research interests
Critical tourism studies; Epistemic decolonization and postcolonial hope; Indigenous resurgence and relationality; Feminist objectivity and interdependency; De-growth alternatives to neoliberalism and authoritarianism
Nick tries to navigate the tensions and contradictions between structuralist and anti-foundationalist perspectives; always attuned to structural analyses of epistemic ‘flow’ through society ... *and* imaginative conceptualizations of new social orders. He is considering a number of possible research projects that involve examinations of how our realities are mediated through relationships with objects and other beings, and through multitudinous 'particular and specific' embodied interpretations of culture and history all around us.