Dr. Bruce Erickson

GEOG 4750 – Understanding Contemporary Environmentalism
GEOG 2640 – Geographies of Culture and Inequality
GEOG 1280 – Introduction to Human Geography

My work examines the cultural politics of outdoor recreation and tourism, asking how the spheres of leisure and recreation form an integral part of our interactions with the social and physical world.  Drawing from cultural geography, political ecology, environmental history, psychoanalysis, leisure studies and critical theory, I aim to highlight how recreational activities are a useful starting place for understanding our relationship to nature, including the consequences our ideas about what counts as nature (and how we should protect and use nature) has on the world around use.  One the main questions that drives my research is what is the role played by leisure and recreation in the production of the conditions of inequality and conflict that surround us, especially in the context of colonialism?  As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission identified, colonialism is a multifaceted legacy in Canada and my research contributes to this understanding by showing how leisure, tourism and environmentalism have been embroiled in the structures of colonization.  Specifically, I illustrate how colonial dispossession of Indigenous land and livelihoods is aided and justified through recreational practices, economic development and even conservation efforts.

Anthropocene Futures: Linking Colonialism and Environmentalism in an Age of Crisis.  Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(1), 111-128.  (2020)

The Politics of the Canoe: Activism and Resistance. (edited with Sarah Wylie Krotz) Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2021.  

Canoe Nation: Nature, Race and the Making of a Canadian Icon. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013.

Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. (edited with Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands) Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. (2010)