Jason Laurendeau
Biographic Data
| ID | 268738 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jason Laurendeau |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jason |
| FAMILY NAME | Laurendeau |
| SIGNATURE | LAURENDEAU J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Lethbridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4030-0596 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 187 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Settler Colonialism–Genocide–Athleticide
In this paper, our scholarly collective traces how athleticide—defined here as the obliteration of sport, sporting cultures, and athletics through the killing, arrest, detention, or disabling of athletes, coaches, staff, officials, and administrators and the destruction of athletic infrastructure and history—has been part of the US–NATO-funded Israeli state’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. Although much of the literature foc…
Settler Colonialism, Sport, and Recreation
Laurendeau interrogates the interconnections between settler colonialism and sport, recreation and physical activity, theorizing sport as both a site of ongoing colonial violence and a vital space of resistance, refusal, and reterritorialization. Laurendeau explains that settler colonialism is not a relic of a past moment but an ongoing genocidal project in still settling states as they perpetually work to claim ownership of and authority over st…
Sport, Physical Activity, and Anti-Colonial Autoethnography
This book offers a brief history of how autoethnography has been employed in studies of sport and physical (in)activity to date and makes an explicit call for anti-colonial approaches – challenging scholars of physical culture to interrogate and write against the colonial assumptions at work in so many physical cultural and academic spaces. It presents examples of autoethnographic work that interrogate physical cultural practices as both produced…
Mountain Equipment Co-Op, “Diversity Work,” and the “Inclusive” Politics of Erasure
In October 2018, Canadian retailer Mountain Equipment Co-op publicly asked, “Do white people dominate the outdoors?” and acknowledged that their representations were “part of [a] problem.” Relying on Ahmed’s theorizations of diversity work, this paper offers an intersectional interrogation of Mountain Equipment Co-op’s (MEC’s) commitment to including more “diversity” in their representations and considers how both MEC’s statement and their early …
The Stories That Will Make a Difference Aren’t the Easy Ones”
In this autoethnography, I read my history of and connection to outdoor culture, with an eye toward interrogating my complicity in historical and ongoing settler-colonial violence that has rendered my love of “the mountains” both possible and ostensibly unproblematic. In so doing, I unsettle (my) understandings of the connections between land, embodiment, masculinities, and able-bodiedness, exploring how settler attachment to the mountains is pre…
‘You don’t need any of that stuff’
In this autoethnography, I draw on an extended experience with, and recovery from, a chronic knee injury to explore a number of (dis)connections. I interrogate this injury, how I made it strange through storying it over an extended period, and how I came to restory it more recently. In so doing, I consider (dis)connections between my body and others’ (e.g. body workers’) bodies, between my body and various biopedagogical technologies, and, centra…
The logic of memory
We seek to engage in this article the current debate in memory studies regarding the definition and nature of the phenomenon of collective memory. Using the controversy over Dow Chemical Corporation’s sponsorship of the London Olympic stadium in 2012 as an example, we theorize memory as inherently logical—that is, as necessary to the maintenance of the overarching logics that govern the political and economic forms of a given society. We suggest …
Where is Childhood? In Conversation With Messner and Musto
In this essay, we build upon Messner and Musto’s recent call for sociologists of sport to take “kids” more seriously; we highlight that in addition to taking kids and kids’ sport more seriously, sport scholars might go further toward considering childhood not simply as a stage of life, but as a set of ideas that shape and are shaped by sporting and recreational practices and discourses. To illustrate the value of this approach, we explore a numbe…
Truth Untold? Evidence, Knowledge, and Research Practice(s)
Morality in the Mountains
In this article, we analyze Canadian newspaper coverage of recent events in which backcountry adventurers have found themselves in need of assistance from rescue organizations. We interrogate discourses of risk and responsibility, exploring the ways in which the media constructs these backcountry enthusiasts as responsible to and for specific (e.g., family) and generalized (e.g., society) others. These discourses, we argue, produce and reproduce …
If You’re Reading This, It’s Because I’ve Died”
In this autoethnography, I highlight the relationship between risk and responsibility in my gender project as I first take up, and then walk away from, BASE jumping. To address these issues, I write into a space of uncertainty, exploring the productive potential of polyvocality and writing as a method of inquiry
Pilgrims of the Vertical
Book Review| October 01 2011 Pilgrims of the Vertical Taylor, Joseph. Pilgrims of the Vertical. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2010. Pp. 368. $29.95 hb. Jason Laurendeau Jason Laurendeau University of Lethbridge Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Sport History (2011) 38 (3): 526–528. https://doi.org/10.5406/jsporthistory.38.3.526 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permi…
Comparative optimism and risky road traffic behaviors among high‐risk sports practitioners
This study examines the relationship between participation in risky sports, comparative optimism (CO), and risky road traffic behaviors among a sample of adult men. We surveyed high‐risk (n = 313) and low‐risk (n = 53) sports practitioners, and non‐sportsmen (n = 89), assessing their CO, as well as their self‐reported risky behaviors and their accident experiences while driving a car. Results show that high‐risk sports practitioners expressed CO …
Gendered Risk Regimes”
Recently, a number of researchers have drawn on Lyng’s (1990) theorization of the concept of edgework in explorations of voluntary risk activities in late modernity. Unfortunately, a theoretical consideration of how these edgework activities are gendered is underdeveloped in the edgework literature. In this article I outline the theories that have dominated edgework literature, critique the general oversight of a nuanced theory of gender in edgew…
The Global and the Local
We draw on Hollway and Jefferson's (1997) idea that global anxieties may find an outlet for individual expression in the realm of crime: we argue that anxieties may also find expression in the realms of ill-health and home safety. To accomplish this, we examine preventative and protective behaviours that individuals undertake in each of these realms as outlets for the expression of anxiety. We consider how personal characteristics, such as age, a…
Women Could Be Every Bit As Good As Guys
This article examines two action sports-skydiving and snowboarding-as cases of women on men's turf and explores the construction of gender in the ways women negotiate space in these male-dominated arenas. It investigates some of the ways in which women's participation in these activities is constrained and the strategies women employ to carve out spaces for themselves in these sporting contexts. Women in both sports tend to engage in strategies r…
Edgework
Reviewed by: Edgework: The Sociology of Risk Taking Jason Laurendeau Stephen Lyng , Edgework: The Sociology of Risk Taking. New York: Routledge, 2005, 297 pp. In the introduction to this volume, Lyng argues that the promise of the edgework approach to voluntary risk lies in its simple answer to the question of why anyone would risk their well-being to participate in activities that seem to offer no material rewards — the "intensely seductive char…
Edgework
Part 1: Introduction 1. Edgework and the Risk Taking Experience Stephen Lyng Part 2: Theoretical Advances in the Study of Edgework 2. Sociology at the Edge: Social theory and voluntary risk taking Stephen Lyng 3. Edgework: A subjective and structural model of negotiating boundaries Dragan Milovanic Part 3: The Edgework Experience: Anarchy and aesthetics 4. The Only Possible Adventure: Edgework and anarchy Jeff Ferrell 5. Edgework and the Aestheti…
He Didn't Go in Doing a Skydive
Exploring Lyng's notion of 'edgework,' this article draws on ethnographic data to explore the ways skydivers create and sustain the belief that they can maintain control while working the 'edge' in this sport. The article focuses on the ways skydivers construct and maintain the 'illusion' that they can exercise control as they negotiate their particular edge. It elaborates the ways this sense of control is constructed and the extent to which it i…
Policing the Edge
In this article, we draw on participant observation and interview data to explore risk and social control in skydiving. We explore Lyng's (1990 Lyng , S. 1990 . " Edgework—a Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk-Taking. " American Journal of Sociology 95 ( 4 ): 851 – 86 . [CSA] [CROSSREF] [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) concept of edgework, and argue that too little attention has been paid to the ways edgeworkers may …
The “Crack Choir” and the “Cock Chorus”
This article undertakes a qualitative exploration of women’s and men’s songs in the skydiving community in order to explore the intersection of gender and sexuality in this context. Analyses reveal that men’s songs constrain the transformative potential of women in skydiving by trivializing, marginalizing, and sexualizing them. Further, they reinforce male hegemony in skydiving through the construction of a hyperheterosexual masculinity. Meanwhil…
Women Could Be Every Bit As Good As Guys
This article examines two action sports-skydiving and snowboarding-as cases of women on men's turf and explores the construction of gender in the ways women negotiate space in these male-dominated arenas. It investigates some of the ways in which women's participation in these activities is constrained and the strategies women employ to carve out spaces for themselves in these sporting contexts. Women in both sports tend to engage in strategies r…
Gendered Risk Regimes”
Recently, a number of researchers have drawn on Lyng’s (1990) theorization of the concept of edgework in explorations of voluntary risk activities in late modernity. Unfortunately, a theoretical consideration of how these edgework activities are gendered is underdeveloped in the edgework literature. In this article I outline the theories that have dominated edgework literature, critique the general oversight of a nuanced theory of gender in edgew…
He Didn't Go in Doing a Skydive
Exploring Lyng's notion of 'edgework,' this article draws on ethnographic data to explore the ways skydivers create and sustain the belief that they can maintain control while working the 'edge' in this sport. The article focuses on the ways skydivers construct and maintain the 'illusion' that they can exercise control as they negotiate their particular edge. It elaborates the ways this sense of control is constructed and the extent to which it i…
If You’re Reading This, It’s Because I’ve Died”
In this autoethnography, I highlight the relationship between risk and responsibility in my gender project as I first take up, and then walk away from, BASE jumping. To address these issues, I write into a space of uncertainty, exploring the productive potential of polyvocality and writing as a method of inquiry
Policing the Edge
In this article, we draw on participant observation and interview data to explore risk and social control in skydiving. We explore Lyng's (1990 Lyng , S. 1990 . " Edgework—a Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk-Taking. " American Journal of Sociology 95 ( 4 ): 851 – 86 . [CSA] [CROSSREF] [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) concept of edgework, and argue that too little attention has been paid to the ways edgeworkers may …
The Stories That Will Make a Difference Aren’t the Easy Ones”
In this autoethnography, I read my history of and connection to outdoor culture, with an eye toward interrogating my complicity in historical and ongoing settler-colonial violence that has rendered my love of “the mountains” both possible and ostensibly unproblematic. In so doing, I unsettle (my) understandings of the connections between land, embodiment, masculinities, and able-bodiedness, exploring how settler attachment to the mountains is pre…
The “Crack Choir” and the “Cock Chorus”
This article undertakes a qualitative exploration of women’s and men’s songs in the skydiving community in order to explore the intersection of gender and sexuality in this context. Analyses reveal that men’s songs constrain the transformative potential of women in skydiving by trivializing, marginalizing, and sexualizing them. Further, they reinforce male hegemony in skydiving through the construction of a hyperheterosexual masculinity. Meanwhil…
Truth Untold? Evidence, Knowledge, and Research Practice(s)
Where is Childhood? In Conversation With Messner and Musto
In this essay, we build upon Messner and Musto’s recent call for sociologists of sport to take “kids” more seriously; we highlight that in addition to taking kids and kids’ sport more seriously, sport scholars might go further toward considering childhood not simply as a stage of life, but as a set of ideas that shape and are shaped by sporting and recreational practices and discourses. To illustrate the value of this approach, we explore a numbe…
Mountain Equipment Co-Op, “Diversity Work,” and the “Inclusive” Politics of Erasure
In October 2018, Canadian retailer Mountain Equipment Co-op publicly asked, “Do white people dominate the outdoors?” and acknowledged that their representations were “part of [a] problem.” Relying on Ahmed’s theorizations of diversity work, this paper offers an intersectional interrogation of Mountain Equipment Co-op’s (MEC’s) commitment to including more “diversity” in their representations and considers how both MEC’s statement and their early …
Morality in the Mountains
In this article, we analyze Canadian newspaper coverage of recent events in which backcountry adventurers have found themselves in need of assistance from rescue organizations. We interrogate discourses of risk and responsibility, exploring the ways in which the media constructs these backcountry enthusiasts as responsible to and for specific (e.g., family) and generalized (e.g., society) others. These discourses, we argue, produce and reproduce …
Settler Colonialism–Genocide–Athleticide
In this paper, our scholarly collective traces how athleticide—defined here as the obliteration of sport, sporting cultures, and athletics through the killing, arrest, detention, or disabling of athletes, coaches, staff, officials, and administrators and the destruction of athletic infrastructure and history—has been part of the US–NATO-funded Israeli state’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. Although much of the literature foc…
Comparative optimism and risky road traffic behaviors among high‐risk sports practitioners
This study examines the relationship between participation in risky sports, comparative optimism (CO), and risky road traffic behaviors among a sample of adult men. We surveyed high‐risk (n = 313) and low‐risk (n = 53) sports practitioners, and non‐sportsmen (n = 89), assessing their CO, as well as their self‐reported risky behaviors and their accident experiences while driving a car. Results show that high‐risk sports practitioners expressed CO …
The Global and the Local
We draw on Hollway and Jefferson's (1997) idea that global anxieties may find an outlet for individual expression in the realm of crime: we argue that anxieties may also find expression in the realms of ill-health and home safety. To accomplish this, we examine preventative and protective behaviours that individuals undertake in each of these realms as outlets for the expression of anxiety. We consider how personal characteristics, such as age, a…
The “Crack Choir” and the “Cock Chorus”
This article undertakes a qualitative exploration of women’s and men’s songs in the skydiving community in order to explore the intersection of gender and sexuality in this context. Analyses reveal that men’s songs constrain the transformative potential of women in skydiving by trivializing, marginalizing, and sexualizing them. Further, they reinforce male hegemony in skydiving through the construction of a hyperheterosexual masculinity. Meanwhil…
Edgework
Reviewed by: Edgework: The Sociology of Risk Taking Jason Laurendeau Stephen Lyng , Edgework: The Sociology of Risk Taking. New York: Routledge, 2005, 297 pp. In the introduction to this volume, Lyng argues that the promise of the edgework approach to voluntary risk lies in its simple answer to the question of why anyone would risk their well-being to participate in activities that seem to offer no material rewards — the "intensely seductive char…
Edgework
Part 1: Introduction 1. Edgework and the Risk Taking Experience Stephen Lyng Part 2: Theoretical Advances in the Study of Edgework 2. Sociology at the Edge: Social theory and voluntary risk taking Stephen Lyng 3. Edgework: A subjective and structural model of negotiating boundaries Dragan Milovanic Part 3: The Edgework Experience: Anarchy and aesthetics 4. The Only Possible Adventure: Edgework and anarchy Jeff Ferrell 5. Edgework and the Aestheti…
He Didn't Go in Doing a Skydive
Exploring Lyng's notion of 'edgework,' this article draws on ethnographic data to explore the ways skydivers create and sustain the belief that they can maintain control while working the 'edge' in this sport. The article focuses on the ways skydivers construct and maintain the 'illusion' that they can exercise control as they negotiate their particular edge. It elaborates the ways this sense of control is constructed and the extent to which it i…
Policing the Edge
In this article, we draw on participant observation and interview data to explore risk and social control in skydiving. We explore Lyng's (1990 Lyng , S. 1990 . " Edgework—a Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk-Taking. " American Journal of Sociology 95 ( 4 ): 851 – 86 . [CSA] [CROSSREF] [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) concept of edgework, and argue that too little attention has been paid to the ways edgeworkers may …
Gendered Risk Regimes”
Recently, a number of researchers have drawn on Lyng’s (1990) theorization of the concept of edgework in explorations of voluntary risk activities in late modernity. Unfortunately, a theoretical consideration of how these edgework activities are gendered is underdeveloped in the edgework literature. In this article I outline the theories that have dominated edgework literature, critique the general oversight of a nuanced theory of gender in edgew…
The Global and the Local
We draw on Hollway and Jefferson's (1997) idea that global anxieties may find an outlet for individual expression in the realm of crime: we argue that anxieties may also find expression in the realms of ill-health and home safety. To accomplish this, we examine preventative and protective behaviours that individuals undertake in each of these realms as outlets for the expression of anxiety. We consider how personal characteristics, such as age, a…
Women Could Be Every Bit As Good As Guys
This article examines two action sports-skydiving and snowboarding-as cases of women on men's turf and explores the construction of gender in the ways women negotiate space in these male-dominated arenas. It investigates some of the ways in which women's participation in these activities is constrained and the strategies women employ to carve out spaces for themselves in these sporting contexts. Women in both sports tend to engage in strategies r…
Comparative optimism and risky road traffic behaviors among high‐risk sports practitioners
This study examines the relationship between participation in risky sports, comparative optimism (CO), and risky road traffic behaviors among a sample of adult men. We surveyed high‐risk (n = 313) and low‐risk (n = 53) sports practitioners, and non‐sportsmen (n = 89), assessing their CO, as well as their self‐reported risky behaviors and their accident experiences while driving a car. Results show that high‐risk sports practitioners expressed CO …
If You’re Reading This, It’s Because I’ve Died”
In this autoethnography, I highlight the relationship between risk and responsibility in my gender project as I first take up, and then walk away from, BASE jumping. To address these issues, I write into a space of uncertainty, exploring the productive potential of polyvocality and writing as a method of inquiry
Pilgrims of the Vertical
Book Review| October 01 2011 Pilgrims of the Vertical Taylor, Joseph. Pilgrims of the Vertical. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2010. Pp. 368. $29.95 hb. Jason Laurendeau Jason Laurendeau University of Lethbridge Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Sport History (2011) 38 (3): 526–528. https://doi.org/10.5406/jsporthistory.38.3.526 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permi…
Morality in the Mountains
In this article, we analyze Canadian newspaper coverage of recent events in which backcountry adventurers have found themselves in need of assistance from rescue organizations. We interrogate discourses of risk and responsibility, exploring the ways in which the media constructs these backcountry enthusiasts as responsible to and for specific (e.g., family) and generalized (e.g., society) others. These discourses, we argue, produce and reproduce …
Truth Untold? Evidence, Knowledge, and Research Practice(s)
Where is Childhood? In Conversation With Messner and Musto
In this essay, we build upon Messner and Musto’s recent call for sociologists of sport to take “kids” more seriously; we highlight that in addition to taking kids and kids’ sport more seriously, sport scholars might go further toward considering childhood not simply as a stage of life, but as a set of ideas that shape and are shaped by sporting and recreational practices and discourses. To illustrate the value of this approach, we explore a numbe…
The logic of memory
We seek to engage in this article the current debate in memory studies regarding the definition and nature of the phenomenon of collective memory. Using the controversy over Dow Chemical Corporation’s sponsorship of the London Olympic stadium in 2012 as an example, we theorize memory as inherently logical—that is, as necessary to the maintenance of the overarching logics that govern the political and economic forms of a given society. We suggest …
‘You don’t need any of that stuff’
In this autoethnography, I draw on an extended experience with, and recovery from, a chronic knee injury to explore a number of (dis)connections. I interrogate this injury, how I made it strange through storying it over an extended period, and how I came to restory it more recently. In so doing, I consider (dis)connections between my body and others’ (e.g. body workers’) bodies, between my body and various biopedagogical technologies, and, centra…
Mountain Equipment Co-Op, “Diversity Work,” and the “Inclusive” Politics of Erasure
In October 2018, Canadian retailer Mountain Equipment Co-op publicly asked, “Do white people dominate the outdoors?” and acknowledged that their representations were “part of [a] problem.” Relying on Ahmed’s theorizations of diversity work, this paper offers an intersectional interrogation of Mountain Equipment Co-op’s (MEC’s) commitment to including more “diversity” in their representations and considers how both MEC’s statement and their early …
The Stories That Will Make a Difference Aren’t the Easy Ones”
In this autoethnography, I read my history of and connection to outdoor culture, with an eye toward interrogating my complicity in historical and ongoing settler-colonial violence that has rendered my love of “the mountains” both possible and ostensibly unproblematic. In so doing, I unsettle (my) understandings of the connections between land, embodiment, masculinities, and able-bodiedness, exploring how settler attachment to the mountains is pre…
Sport, Physical Activity, and Anti-Colonial Autoethnography
This book offers a brief history of how autoethnography has been employed in studies of sport and physical (in)activity to date and makes an explicit call for anti-colonial approaches – challenging scholars of physical culture to interrogate and write against the colonial assumptions at work in so many physical cultural and academic spaces. It presents examples of autoethnographic work that interrogate physical cultural practices as both produced…
Settler Colonialism, Sport, and Recreation
Laurendeau interrogates the interconnections between settler colonialism and sport, recreation and physical activity, theorizing sport as both a site of ongoing colonial violence and a vital space of resistance, refusal, and reterritorialization. Laurendeau explains that settler colonialism is not a relic of a past moment but an ongoing genocidal project in still settling states as they perpetually work to claim ownership of and authority over st…
Settler Colonialism–Genocide–Athleticide
In this paper, our scholarly collective traces how athleticide—defined here as the obliteration of sport, sporting cultures, and athletics through the killing, arrest, detention, or disabling of athletes, coaches, staff, officials, and administrators and the destruction of athletic infrastructure and history—has been part of the US–NATO-funded Israeli state’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. Although much of the literature foc…
Sociology (17 works) · Adventure Sports and Sensation Seeking (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Sports, Gender, and Society (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (7 works)