Leisure and Tourism Lab

This partnership project between The Calian Group, Emergency Management Solutions and Dr. Christine Van Winkle is intended to enhance crisis communication at festivals and events. Specifically, this research will explore how festivals and the public communicate through social media during an on-site emergency. The findings will allow the team to develop crisis communication best practices and training intended for the festival and event industry. A second research project informing this line of research explores the crisis communication plans of festivals across Canada and seeks to understand festival administrators and emergency planners perceptions of crisis communication best practices.

Mobile devices are increasingly a part of our daily lives and while much research has examined user acceptance and diffusion of technology in formal workplace settings, research is needed to better understand technology adoption and diffusion in free-choice environments. To better understand factors affecting technology adoption and outcomes of technology use in free-choice contexts, mobile device use at festivals is be examined.

With the recent legalization of Cannabis across Canada there is a need to better understand the implications for festivals. Many stakeholders will be affected by this social change including attendees, volunteers, vendors, funders and staff.

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.