Leisure and Tourism Lab

The research of Revelry and Resilience explores how festivals contribute to community disaster recovery. The theoretical framework integrates resilience theory with a service ecosystem perspective, examining how networks and relationships enable collective value creation in disaster contexts.

The methodology employs a multiple embedded case study design examining four festivals representing different disaster types (human, technological, hydrological, geophysical) and organizational structures (existing organizations that pivot versus new organizations created for recovery). Data collection includes semi-structured interviews with festival staff, government officials, attendees and residents, along with observations and document analysis.

This research addresses a significant gap in understanding festivals' role in disaster recovery and aims to provide evidence-based recommendations for integrating festivals into community recovery strategies.

This research program examines how festivals contribute to disaster management across all phases, from preparation through recovery. The work investigates both emerging and established community festivals, with particular focus on festivals addressing wildfire disaster management.

Drawing on resilience theory, the research explores how festivals function as connection hubs and centres of dynamic capability that support community resilience, built upon foundations of social capital and negative capability. The research suggests that investing in community festival organizations represents a strategic approach to fostering community resilience in disaster contexts.

This project is driven by interrelated research questions about gender, youth, sexuality, and play by connecting 2SLGBTQ youth to a drag performance and genderplay workshop. In the workshop, mentors work with youth to explore gender through make up, movement to music, and costuming. Using critical ethnographic practices to reflect on our social location and impact we observe youth and drag artists in a context where we are intentionally playing with gender expression through drag performance. We investigate how performativity works to replicate social norms, even in the safer space of the drag workshop, and the ways in which youth are able to make new claims to identity and renegotiate precarity.

Eroding equity in public recreation: the case of municipal pools in low-income Winnipeg neighbourhoods.

This Pools Project is a response to the closure of Happyland pool in Winnipeg, despite widespread community outrage and fundraising. The aim of the research is to understand the meaning and use of pools for community members in low-income neighbourhoods that have experienced a pool closure as well as articulate how the City of Winnipeg has changed the way it invests in public recreation and the impacts for low-income communities in Winnipeg.

This study explores what discourses and practices a queer-inclusive camp in Ontario use to ensure that all campers and staff, especially queer identifying folks, felt safe, included and valued. Summer camps have a history of assuming heterosexuality and gender binary in the way that sleeping, toileting and shower facilities are organised, and how social cultures were constructed. 

This study shares how Camp Menesetung is working toward social justice by making changes and navigating challenges to provide a place that celebrates and affirms individuals' value and identities. This research is supported, in part, by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Development Grant.

Mini U is a long-standing camp program at UM that delivers beneficial recreational programs to over 6000 campers each summer. While the scale and quality of the enterprise is impressive, it is the unique culture the staff team carefully and intentionally foster each season that translates to camper and staff enjoyment and growth. 

The preliminary findings suggest that Mini U is an exceptional place for young adults to work. Staff report feeling seen, supported, encouraged and stretched to their fullest potential; even when they didn't see it for themselves at first. This study considers how organisational culture, such as the concept of "mattering" (Flett, 2017), leads youthful employees to have the capacity and values needed for excellent youth program delivery. 

This study is a pilot initiative of FKRM to facilitate partnerships of research expertise and business services complete applied research that benefit the faculty.

The purpose of this study is to co-design (with an advisory group of TR professionals) a standardized theraputic recreation (TR) assessment process for Manitoba personal care home (PCH) residents that can consistently be used to plan meaningful recreation goals and activities. Data will be gathered using an environmental scan of current Canadian TR assessment strategies, an online PCH TR staff survey, interviews with PCH residents and/or family members/close friends, and in-depth interviews with a small group of TR professionals.