Jeff Rose

White Privilege in Experiential Education: A Critical Reflection

Through narrative and critique, this critical analysis addresses the role and reification of privilege in the pedagogical processes of experiential education. Using whiteness as a critical and theoretical lens, we argue experiential education is a privileged pedagogy, aimed at maintaining the status quo and reproducing dominant power relations between racialized social groups. Participants, instructors, spaces, and activities often reflect the embedded whiteness of experiential education. We critically examine the use of challenge in experiential education and offer a language of possibility for future trajectories for experiential education which facilitates more just and equitable teaching and learning processes.

The neoliberal assault on the public university: the case of recreation, park, and leisure research.

Public universities face critical challenges in terms of teaching, researching, and providing service. Funding mechanisms for various departments, programs, and professors have become increasingly intertwined with market-driven forces in light of neoliberal political and economic philosophies. In this essay, we illuminate neoliberalism and its multiple influences in university recreation, parks, and leisure studies departments. In noting classical theories of leisure and the deleterious aspects of neoliberalism, we encourage researchers, teachers, administrators, and students to resist these prevalent cultural trends, evoking a normative role for universities in the provision of a liberal education.

Balancing tourism, conservation, and development: a political ecology of ecotourism on the Galapagos Islands

Thousands of tourists venture to the internationally renowned Galapagos Islands each year to admire the same pristine nature Darwin came upon over 150 years ago. While appreciating the landscape, many visitors fail to understand the interconnectedness of the tourism industry, Galapagos conservation efforts, and development on the inhabited islands of the archipelago. This research stems from 6 weeks of in-depth field research on San Cristóbal Island, Galapagos Islands, and demonstrates the ways in which island residents are forced to navigate the complex intersection of tourism, conservation, and development on the most local scale. Conservation political ecology examines the asymmetrical power relations in protected areas. Therefore, to understand the impacts of conservation and tourism on local communities, political ecology frames research findings to illustrate how relationships between conservation, tourism, and development have altered not only the San Cristóbal community, but also locals’ perceptions of various actors, their own agency, and Galapagos nature. The San Cristóbal municipal government aims to implement a version of ‘true’ ecotourism, which would allow residents to reclaim political agency, yet the lack of aid and transparency throughout larger scales of Ecuadorian governance challenges these local ideals.

The Art of Guiding in Nature-Based Adventure Tourism – How Guides Can Create Client Value and Positive Experiences on Mountain Bike and Backcountry Ski Tours

Abstract This paper examines the ways in which guides contribute to creating value to clients. The context is nature-based adventure tourism in the specific mediums of mountain bike and backcountry ski tours in Utah and Idaho, USA. Qualitative interviews of clients and guides combined with participant observations are used to explore how guides interact with clients to increase their perceived value. Important findings are related to how guides use their knowledge about the activity, the area, safety management, as well as their organizational skills, to effectively and conveniently facilitate fun experiences with minimum risk exposure. The paper also documents guides’ contributions related to learning, relational aspects, entertainment techniques, and providing information about environmentally friendly behavior. An important theoretical contribution is the identification of how guides carefully balance thrilling and safe experiences and avoid experiences that cause anxiety. The study documents how guides can contribute to prevent negative incidents like conflicts within the client group, or possible accidents. The study indicates that there is a potential for increased contributions from guides especially related to choreographing experiences, interpreting nature, and learning of behaving environmentally.

Disrupting neoliberal discourse in critical sustainability education: a qualitative analysis of intentional language framing

While education for sustainability is a critical task that is gaining ground in a plethora of educational contexts, it is frequently rendered ineffective in the face of neoliberal practice and discourse. Here we examine the pervasive impacts of neoliberalism on education for sustainability, looking specifically at discursive formations that shape our understandings of humans in and as nature. Throughout ecological texts, root metaphors carry forward specific cultural histories that serve neoliberal agendas by positioning nature as commodity and humans as consumers. We sought to systematically understand how manipulating a root metaphor in the creation of instructional texts might disrupt neoliberal discourse and foster critical sustainability. Using a thought-listing technique to explore student response patterns qualitatively allowed for insights into the power of discourse in educational contexts. Data support the notion that intentional framing may be a powerful tool in education for sustainability. We argue that language and discourse are necessary and effective grounds for change if sustainability is to take root.

Homelessness, nature, and health: toward a feminist political ecology of masculinities

Abstract Engaging with feminist political ecology and leveraging experiences from a 16-month critical ethnography, this research explores ways in which masculinities served as both a rationale and an outcome of men facing homelessness living in the margins of an urban municipal public park – a space known as ‘the Hillside.’ Ethnographic narratives point to Hillside residents making their home in nature, connecting experiences in nature with various masculinities, and the gendered eschewing of social services. These portrayals further highlight the perceived feminization of social services within a context of rapidly neoliberalizing urban environments, and illustrate the ways participants positioned and engaged with social services. Entanglements of health and nonhuman nature prompt a feminist political ecological engagement with masculinity. Experiences from the Hillside add textured richness to discourses concerning the ways in which contemporary landscapes are constructed, perceived, experienced, and co-constituted through and with gender.

Immaterial labour in spaces of leisure: producing biopolitical subjectivities through Facebook

This research critically examines ways in which highly popular yet relatively under theorised leisure experiences inform and are informed by the social and political governance of our everyday lives. Specifically, online social networking, as seen through Facebook, actively produces leisure spaces, even if these spaces are primarily constituted through their discursive dimensions. By introducing the critical lenses of Marx’s notion of immaterial labour and Foucault’s biopolitics, we describe the ways in which leisure engagement with Facebook produces new forms of often hidden labour from users, thereby further contributing to the biopolitical control over many of our everyday experiences. These increasingly nuanced assemblages of leisure–labour relationships further destabilise any contention that leisure and labour are distinct sociological dimensions in people’s lives. We consider ways in which Facebook can counter various problematic hegemonic global structures, incorporating Hardt and Negri’s hopeful ideas of the multitude as a form of resistance toward global neoliberal capitalism. From this critical perspective, we explicitly politicise Facebook and layer the ways in which Facebook is currently working (and not working) with Hardt and Negri’s ideas of a more-realised democracy in order to illuminate some of the flaws in Facebook’s structure and typical operation. Such overtly critical scholarship can contribute to further positioning leisure as a dynamic social institution that constantly becomes conscripted into capitalist structures in increasingly covert ways. Such politicised understandings of leisure, broadly, and individuals’ social media experiences, more specifically, offer substantial direction for leisure understanding, scholarship and critique.

Ontologies of Socioenvironmental Justice: Homelessness and the Production of Social Natures

Abstract Everyday experiences of the Hillside residents, individuals facing homelessness while living in a municipal park, provide a context of inquiry for both social and environmental justice. Ethnographic exploration of this sociopolitical and socioenvironmental setting illustrates the ontological complexities surrounding constructions of the nonhuman world, discursive and material realities, social and environmental justice, and homelessness. Ontological examinations of discursive and material nature provide a basis for exploring interrelationships between social and environmental justice, with the concepts becoming inextricably interconnected. The Hillside residents engage with nature in both externalized and relational ways, contesting their perceived statuses as “being homeless.” Critical perspectives of social and environmental justice provide a conceptual framework for understanding lived experiences of homelessness under the social, political, and economic forces of capitalism.

Managers’ Perceptions of Illegal Marijuana Cultivation on U.S. Federal Lands

Illegal marijuana cultivation on public lands is a complex social and ecological concern increasingly encountered by managers and federal officials. The negative ecological impacts of remote marijuana grow sites are in the nascent stages of scientific understanding; therefore, systematic inquiry into management perspectives about this issue lacks examination. Using purposive sampling, researchers interviewed a diversity of administrators, ecologists, and law enforcement professionals (n = 29) from U.S. federal agencies involved in preventing and responding to illegal marijuana cultivation on public lands. Interview data were analyzed using common pool resource design principles (Ostrom 1990) to (a) understand managers’ challenges, successes, ideas, and experiences regarding illegal marijuana cultivation, and (b) highlight specific drivers that prohibit, assist, and influence the prevention, mitigation, and response to this issue. Salient themes from the interviews include management complexity, adequate funding, agency collaboration, ecological impacts, and unknown future challenges associated with legality.

Toward a More Phronetic Leisure Science

In this essay, we examine the assumptions underlying natural science, social science, and the humanities. More specifically, we suggest that social science in general and leisure science in particular be guided by a different set of assumptions than those guiding natural science and the humanities. Drawing on the Aristotelian idea of phronesis, we propose that value rationality more so than instrumental rationality guide social scientific inquiry, and that social science in general, and leisure science in particular, be viewed as a bridge between natural science and the humanities.