Laurendeau, Jason

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https://opus.uleth.ca/handle/10133/3137

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Browsing Laurendeau, Jason by Author "Laurendeau, Jason"

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    Are perceived comparative risks realistic among high-risk sports participants?
    (Human Kinetics, 2010) Martha, Cecile; Laurendeau, Jason
    This poper examined how risk sports practitioners, compared with those of the average sports participant, perceive their abilities to manage risks (AMR) and their vulnerability to a serious injury (VSI) whilst participating. We also examined which variables influence perceived comparative VSI. High-risk and moderate-risk sports participonts (n = 432) completed measures of perceived personal AMR, perceived comparative AMR and VSI, and motive of playing to the limit. Results showed that high-risk sports practitioners perceived their VSI as being higher than the average sports participant, while moderate-risk practitioners perceived their VSI as being lower. Perceived comparative VSI was negatively related to perceived personol AMR and positively related to past injury episode, sporting experience, and playing to the limit. In conclusion, perceived comparative risks were similarly realistic amongst high-risk sports practitioners. Future research is needed to further examine the role that perceived comparative risks play in the risk-taking decision-making process.
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    The global and the local: precautionary behaviors in the realms of crime, health, and home safety
    (University of Alberta, 2009) Van Brunschot, Erin Gibbs; Laurendeau, Jason; Keown, Leslie-Anne
    Expressions of anxieties are examined in the realms of crime, health and home safety. We consider protective behaviours that individuals undertake in each of these realms as potential outlets for the expression of anxiety; the way in which elements of social context such as age, education and income, and biographical factors including past experiences, perceived control, and anxieties about future events contribute to protective behaviours within each realm is examined. Findings indicate different factors drive precautionary behaviours for men and women, suggesting gender as a lens through which precautionary behaviours are taken up. Global anxiety inconsistently predicts precautionary behaviours — a finding that questions both the utility of and the theoretical significance of global anxiety. Local (individual) negative experiences within these realms play an important role in predicting preventative behaviour, although the impact of negative experiences among the realms and between the sexes is inconsistent. Light is shed on the relationship between global anxieties and local expressions suggesting that behaviour may have a far more local element than might be expected.
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    'Jumping like a girl': Discursive silences, exclusionary practices, and the controversy over women's ski jumping
    (Taylor and Francis, 2010) Laurendeau, Jason; Adams, Carly
    This paper considers the recent International Olympic Committee (IOC) decision to deny women the opportunity to compete in ski jumping at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. Drawing on a feminist Foucauldian framework, we suggest that the Olympics is a discourse that constructs excellence and fairness as “within the true,” with the IOC protesting that this recent decision is not about gender, but about the upholding of Olympic ideals. We interrogate three conspicuous absences in this discourse, each of which trouble the IOC’s claim that this decision is not evidence of gender discrimination. In particular, we contextualize this decision within the risk discourses upon which the IOC has historically drawn on denying women’s participation in particular Olympic events, arguing that the discursive silence around the issue of risk points to “old wine in new bottles” as the IOC dresses up the same paternalistic practices in new garb. We conclude with a consideration of these discursive structures as more than simply oppressive of women. Instead, they may also be understood as indicative of the ‘problem’ posed by women, especially those who threaten the gender binary that pervades many sporting structures. Finally, these structures signal opportunities for resistance and subversion as women act to shed light on the discursive silences upon which structures of domination rest.
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    "Just tape it up for me, ok?": Masculinities, injury and embodied emotion
    (Elsevier, 2013) Laurendeau, Jason
    In this autoethnography, I consider the emotionality of sustaining and exacerbating an athletic injury. I interrogate youth sport experiences in which coaches and teammates lauded my willingness to play sport with little regard for my physical well-being, and the anxieties, doubts, and frustrations I experienced through the process of 'recovering' from my injury. In the process, I forefront my (athletic) identity, and the embodied emotionality of confronting a 'failing' body upon which it rest(s/ed). Additionally, I critically interrogate violence as a thread running through practices and discourses of masculinity, situating my researching body at the "intersecting vectors of power, knowledge, and identity" (Giardina and Newman, 2011a: 524).
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    Morality in the mountains: risk, responsibility, and neoliberalism in newspaper accounts of backcountry rescue
    (Sage Publications, 2012) Laurendeau, Jason; Moroz, Sara
    In this article, we analyze Canadian newspaper coverage of recent events in which backcountry adventurers have found themselves in need of assistance from rescue organizations. We interrogate discourses of risk and responsibility, exploring the ways in which the media constructs these backcountry enthusiasts as responsible to and for specific (e.g., family) and generalized (e.g., society) others. These discourses, we argue, produce and reproduce neoliberal notions of risk management, constructing citizens as responsible for managing their ‘‘risk profiles.’’
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    Policing the edge: risk and social control in skydiving
    (Taylor & Francis, 2006) Laurendeau, Jason; Van Brunschot, Erin G.
    In this article, we draw on participant observation and interview data to explore risk and social control in skydiving. We explore Lyng’s (1990) concept of edgework, and argue that too little attention has been paid to the ways edgeworkers may be enabled or constrained by various actors both outside and inside the edgework setting. We suggest that, while skydiving evokes notions of freedom and creativity, participants, and to a lesser extent outsiders, constrain individual freedoms in skydiving through various formal and informal attempts at policing. In particular, experienced skydivers monitor how other jumpers go about negotiating the edge, often subtly and sometimes conspicuously encouraging them to perform edgework in an acceptable manner. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the conceptualization of the edgework model.
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    "The stories that will make a difference aren't the easy ones": outdoor recreation, the wilderness ideal, and complicating settler mobility
    (Human Kinetics, 2020) Laurendeau, Jason
    In this autoethnography, I read my history of and connection to outdoor culture, with an eye towards interrogating my complicity in historical and ongoing settler-colonial violence that has rendered my love of “the mountains” both possible and ostensibly unproblematic. In so doing, I unsettle (my) understandings of the connections between land, embodiment, masculinities, and able-bodiedness, exploring how settler attachment to the mountains is predicated on, and serves to perpetuate, a(n ongoing) history of land dispossession. I also, however, consider a “different temporal horizon” through a discussion of settler futurity as it relates to outdoor recreation, complicating settler mobility in the process.
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    "Women could be every bit as good as guys" Reproductive and resistant agency in the two "action" sports
    (Sage, 2008) Laurendeau, Jason; Sharara, Nancy
    This article examines two action sports—skydiving and snowboarding—as cases of women on men’s turf and explores the construction of gender in the ways women negotiate space in these male-dominated arenas. It investigates some of the ways in which women’s participation in these activities is constrained and the strategies women employ to carve out spaces for themselves in these sporting contexts. Women in both sports tend to engage in strategies rooted in middle-class and liberal notions of resistance. Most of these exemplify what researchers have called “reproductive agency.” Some strategies, however, seem to exemplify “resistant agency.” The article explores the potential of these strategies to bring about meaningful social change.