Black Prairie Leisure

Remediating Black Experiences of Leisure on the Canadian Prairies

Remediating Black Experiences of Leisure in The Canadian Prairies explores Black Canadians’ racialized realities when accessing leisure time and activities in both physical and digital landscapes of the Canadian Prairies. A generalized understanding of leisure is connected to notions of either freedom or unobligated time and is neither connected to work nor performing other life-sustaining functions (Beggs et al. 2014; Bull 2009; Dumazedier 1968; Leitner 2012). For this project, leisure is understood to consist of three fundamental frameworks: (1) leisure as time; (2) leisure as activity; and (3) leisure as a state of mind (Beggs et al. 2014). The very nature of leisure's three components is subjective since leisure varies on a case-by-case basis. For Black Canadians such as myself living on the Albertan Prairies, racial and gendered access to both leisure activities and leisure time is marked by boundaries such as racism in the form of microaggressions, poverty, and stereotypes (Pinckney 2018; Floyd, Bocarro & Thompson 2008; Floyd 2007; Freysinger 2006). Through qualitative methods informed by anthropology (interviews, digital storytelling, and archival work), I will collect Black narratives about these topics to build an open access, interactive, web-based, digital platform that remediates historical and contemporary erasure of Black experiences (Christen 2018). 

LINK TO THESIS: www.open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0418429?o=1

RESEARCH TEAM

PI: Daliso Mwanza (Master Research, PI)
Master’s Supervisor: Fiona P. McDonald, PhD (UBCO)

Committee Members: Bonar Buffam, PhD (Sociology) UBCO and Karina Vernon, PhD (English/Humanities) University of Toronto  

FUNDED BY