Dr. Susan Frohlick

• Current Research
• Research Grants and Awards
• Publications
• Recent Conference Papers
• Courses Taught
• Current Graduate Students
• Past Students' Theses

CURRENT RESEARCH

My current research focuses on how people’s intimate relations and subjectivities are shaped by global, local, and transnational processes, mostly international tourism, migration, and immigration, but also Internet communication. I am interested in the lived experiences and “negotiation” of gender, sexuality, and intimacy, bound up with race and class, in the twenty-first century context of human movement across borders, modernity, late capitalism and multiculturalism.

My research and the research of my students pose such questions as: How do people decipher and grapple with different and often competing cultural gender and sexuality norms?  How does human sociality and subjectivity change through travel? In what ways are local sexual cultures affected by global tourism? How are sexual rights created and challenged by migration and immigration? 

For the past several years in a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, I conducted ethnographic research in Costa Rica in a small transnational town in the southern Caribbean region. My fieldwork was with Euro-North American women tourists and expatriates and their social worlds. I wanted to know how international travel shaped their sexual subjectivities as heterosexual Northern women. I am currently writing a book from that research.

Two new projects look at youth sexuality, sexual rights, and sexual health. One project is centered in Costa Rica and is looking at the impact of tourism on local youths’ sexuality. With the expansion of tourism development into the Caribbean region, Afro-Caribbean youth engage in transactional sexual and intimate relations with tourists while they are deprived of sexual education and contraception services by the Catholic state. A second project (funded by CIHR) looks at the inner city of Winnipeg, Canada, where immigrant and refugee youth from African communities interpret new sexual “freedoms” and cultural codes in a multicultural society, and how they deal with vulnerabilities to increasing prevalence of HIV, as well as poverty and racism.

I am the lead investigator on a catalyst grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for Community-Based Research on HIV involving three western Canadian cities with growing populations of African newcomers- Winnipeg, Calgary, and Vancouver. As a team of academic researchers and community organizations we are experimenting with methods and developing capacity to engage youth in sexual health research.

 

RESEARCH GRANTS AND AWARDS (Last five years)

November 2010 to October 2011

• Nominated Principal Applicant
  In collaboration with Sexuality Education Resource Centre (Winnipeg), Nine Circles Community Health Centre (Winnipeg), Connecting Communities Coalition (Winnipeg), The Purpose Society (Vancouver), AIDS Calgary Awareness Association (Calgary), Dr. David Este (University of Calgary), BC Persons with AIDS Society (Vancouver), Dr. Cynthia Patton (SFU), Alberta Council on HIV (Edmonton), Dr. Catherine Worthington (University of Calgary).
• Canadian Institutes of Health Research Catalyst Grant: HIV/AIDS (Community-Based Research)
  “Engaging Newcomer Communities in Sexual Health Research: Understanding Cultural Factors for HIV Risk Reduction amongst Immigrant and Refugee Ethno-Racial Youth in Western Canada” $32, 870.00.

May 2009-June 2010

• Principal Investigator
  University of Manitoba Research Grants Program Grant “Afro-Caribbean Costa Rican Male Youths’ Understandings of Their Sexuality” $6,300.

April 2009 to May 2010

• Nominated Principal Applicant
  In collaboration with Nine Circles Community Health Centre (Winnipeg) and Dr. Janice Ristock (University of Manitoba).
• Canadian Institutes of Health Research Meetings, Planning and Dissemination Grant: Infection and Immunity “Winnipeg African Refugee/Immigrant Youth and Sexual Health, Sexually Transmitted Infections, and HIV” $3, 480.00.

April 2007- June 2008

• In collaboration with Sexuality Education Resource Centre (SERC) in Winnipeg
  University of Manitoba-Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Internal Grant.  "Surfing for Love": Women, the Internet, and Sexual and Intimate Relationships, $5, 558.

April 2004- March 2007

• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant, “Gender, Globalization, and ‘Women’s Travel’,” $51, 500.

Award

2008: Rh Award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship and Research in Social Sciences, University of Manitoba and Winnipeg Rh Institute Foundation $10, 000.

 

PUBLICATIONS (last five years)

Journal Articles:

• Frohlick, Susan and Lynda Johnston (in press) Naturalizing Bodies and Place: Tourism Media Campaigns and Heterosexualities in Costa Rica and New Zealand. Annals of Tourism Research.
• Frohlick, Susan and Paula Migliardi (2011) “Heterosexual Profiling:” Online Dating and “Becoming” Heterosexualities for Women Aged 30 and Older in the Digital Era. Australian Feminist Studies 26 (67):75-90.
• Frohlick. Susan (2009) Pathos of Love in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica: Emotion, Travel and Migration. Mobilities 4(3):389-405.
• Frohlick, Susan (2008) Negotiating The Public Secrecy of Sex in a Tansnational Tourist Town in Caribbean Costa Rica. Tourist Studies 8(1):19-39.
• Frohlick, Susan and Julia Harrison (2008) Introduction: Engaging Ethnography in Tourist Rresearch. Tourist Studies 8(1): 5-18. Special issue, co-editor with Julia Harrison entitled “Engaging Ethnography with Tourist Studies.” (Note: 50% authorship).
• Frohlick, Susan (2007) Fluid Exchanges: The Negotiation of Intimacy Between Tourist Women and Local Men in a Transnational Town in Caribbean Costa Rica. City & Society 9 (1): 139-168.
• Frohlick, Susan (2006) “Wanting The Children and Wanting K2”: The Incommensurability of Motherhood and Mountaineering in Britain and North America in The Late Twentieth Century. Gender, Place & Culture 13 (5): 477-490.
• Frohlick, Susan (2005) “That Playfulness of White Masculinity”: Mediating Masculinities and Adventure at Mountain Film Festivals. Tourist Studies 5 (2): 175-193.

Book Chapters:

• Frohlick, Susan (2010) The Sex of Tourism. In Thinking Through Tourism (ASA Monograph), Julie Scott and Tom Selywn, eds. Berg.
• Frohlick, Susan (2008) “I’m More Sexy Here”: Erotic Subjectivities of Female Tourists in The “Sexual Paradise” of Caribbean Costa Rica. In Gendered Mobilities, Tanu Priya Uteng and Tim Cresswell, eds. Pg. 129-142. Ashgate.
• Frohlick, Susan (2006) Rendering and Gendering Mobile Subjects: Placing Ourselves Between Local Ethnography and Global Worlds. In Locating the Field: Metaphors of Space, Place and Context in Anthropology, Simon Coleman and Peter Collins, eds, pp. 87-104. Oxford: Berg Press.

 

RECENT CONFERENCE PAPERS (last five years)

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE PAPERS

2010: He Made Me Rondon Soup:’ Food, Appetite and Carnal Tourism in Costa Rica, Third International Conference on Emotional Geographies, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia, April 6-8.

2009: “’Doling Out Colones:’ Skirmishes Over Money in Northern Women’s Heterosexual Transnational Encounters in Costa Rica,” Australian Anthropological Society meetings, Sydney, Australia, December 9-11.

2009: "Ciphering, Commodifying, and Consolidating Heterosexual Femininity Through Global Cyber Dating Market.” International Association of the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society annual meetings in Hanoi, Vietnam, April 15-18.

2008: "’Women Who Love Too Much:’ The Pathology and Affect of Emotion on The Mobility of Female Tourists in Costa Rica.” Love, Sexuality, and Migration Workshop, University of Sussex, England. March 14-14. Organizers, Russell King (University of Sussex) and Nicola Mai (London Metropolitan University).

2007: “Privacy Matters: Conundrums of Sexual Secrecy in a Transnational Town in Costa Rica,” Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK meetings, Metropolitan London University, London, England, April 10-13.

NORTH AMERICAN CONFERENCE PAPERS 

2011: "Doing White Girls:” Race, Sex, and Tactics of African Immigrant Youth in Multicultural Canada. Paper presented at the Society of Applied Anthropology meetings in Seattle, WA, March 29- April 2.  

2008: “Border Crossings and Desire: Embodiment and Emotions in Women’s Romance Tourism in Costa Rica,” in the panel Erotic Mobilities: Gender, Affect, and Desire in Transactional Heterosexual Romance, Organizers Ara Wilson (Duke University) and Susan Frohlick. American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings, Invited Status, co-sponsored by Association for Feminist Anthropology (AFA) and Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA), San Francisco, November 18-21.

 

COURSES TAUGHT

I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in the areas of the anthropology of travel and tourism; gender, sex, and sexuality; ethnographic methods; and urban, national, global and transnational anthropology.

In September 2011, I will be offering a graduate seminar on Sexuality, Globalization, and the Politics of Mobility.

Visit AURORA Student for more information about course offerings.

 

CURRENT GRADUATE STUDENTS

Jacenta Bahri (PhD) has a background in fashion and textiles and plans to combine her interests in the body, clothing, and dance with feminist and political economic theories to conduct ethnographic research on exotic dancing in Canada and the commodification of intimacies and intimate labour.

Katie Dutfield (MA) is carrying out fieldwork in Winnipeg with young women from Nigeria and Sierra Leone to understand how life in Canada, a consumer and multicultural society, and ideas about modernity have influenced their dating practices and sexual identities.

Martin Kashty (MA) brings years of experience as a school teacher to his thesis on how masculinities are performed through reading, based on many months of ethnographic research in a classroom setting in a primary school in Winnipeg.

Susan Forsythe (MA) is writing a thesis on the globalization of intimacies for crewmembers working and living on cruise ships, drawing on her experience as a former crewmember as well as from interviews and media analysis.

 

PAST STUDENTS' THESES

Kris Maksymowisz (MA) “Masculinities and Intimacies: Performance and Negotiation in a Transnational Tourist Town in Caribbean Costa Rica”

Kirsten Brooks (MA) "'The unreasonable artist' : a political economy of creative life"

Ginna Berg (MA) "'Zapa-turismo' in San Cristobal de las Casa: from trouble spot to hot spot"


Jessica Herrera (MA) "The Casa Matsinguenka ecotourism indigenous lodge enterprise in Manu National Park, Peru"


Chisono Yamaga (MA) "Asian girl meets Asian boy: fantasy and desire in the 'Asian' vacationscapes of Nepal"


Brian Barth (MA) “Facing Challenges on Campus: The Experiences of Postsecondary Students With Disabilities”

Lisa Cooke (MA) "Narratiing Norther Places: Space, Place and Environmentalism in Whitehorse, Yukon"

In Memory of Diane Grant

On February 15, an anthropology graduate student, Dianne Grant, died from cancer at the age of 41. In the midst of writing her dissertation based on extensive fieldwork with women involved in the street sex trade, she described her research as follows: 

“Slaves, sinners, and saviours: the political economy of sex work in Winnipeg,” 
My ethnographic research will address how destructive social policies are created and sustained at the expense of the lived realities for adult sex workers in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I will also attend to the ideological framework that local media and police draw upon to circulate discourses that construct sex workers as a monolithic, morally bankrupt entity, which feeds contemporary social policy that effectively sharpens the neoliberalization of the Canadian federal government.

The University of Manitoba bestowed a posthumous doctorate degree to Dianne in recognition of her scholarship. The Anthropology Department has set up an award in her name, The Dianne Grant Memorial Award, to remember her and honor her work, and to assist future anthropology students working in a similar area. With the help Jacenta Bahri, I hope to publish some of Dianne’s findings in the coming years. Dianne was a generous, caring, bright and vibrant member of our department, and friend to many of us. She is greatly missed.