Laurendeau, Jason
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- Item"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, JasonIn 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.
- ItemThe 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-AnneExpressions 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.
- Item"Just tape it up for me, ok?": Masculinities, injury and embodied emotion(Elsevier, 2013) Laurendeau, JasonIn 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).
- ItemMorality in the mountains: risk, responsibility, and neoliberalism in newspaper accounts of backcountry rescue(Sage Publications, 2012) Laurendeau, Jason; Moroz, SaraIn 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.’’
- ItemPolicing 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.