Caroline Fusco - University of Toronto
Français
There is a widely held, but relatively new and inconsistently documented, belief that access to
recreation space is a key indicator of sport and physical activity participation, which has resulted
in calls for research to be conducted on the impact of the built environment on active living
opportunities, and for the collection of micro-scale data on environments and young people’s
active living. Provincial and municipal governments in Ontario have introduced several initiatives
– Daily Physical Activity in Schools Initiative, Healthy Schools Initiative, Pause-to-Play, and
ReActivate-TO – that attempt to address environment determinants of health and urge young
people to participate more in active living.
The proposed research will be an in-depth ethnographic study of the geographies of sport and
physical activity participation in order to develop a theoretically and empirically grounded
account of the dynamic social and spatial forces of inclusion and exclusion experienced by
adolescents within their unique urban contexts. The research will take place at four sites in
Toronto – an inner-city co-educational school, a Toronto inner-city school program for
lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer students, a Toronto inner-city community recreation
centre, which runs programs for adolescent girls only, and a privately run fitness club for girls
and boys. It will analyze the socio-spatial relations of youth across a range of socio-cultural
categories (gender, sexuality, age, ability, ethnicity and socio-economic status).
The core objective of this research, namely, the investigation of the extent to which diversely-situated
youth experience certain mechanisms (social and spatial) of inclusion and exclusion
that impact on their sport and physical activity participation, demands methods that foreground
space, sport and physical activity and that take account of the particular social and spatial
dynamics in youth’s lives. Child and youth researchers have advocated ethical symmetry and
participatory methods with youth in order to increase opportunities for inclusive democratic
citizenship. As such, my methods have been especially selected to render explicit the complex
interplay of factors that impact on how youth experience and discursively construct places, as
well as how, within such places, they are interpellated by (and position themselves within)
dominant and/or alternative discourses on health, the body, gender, sexuality race, class and
ability. For instance, drawing on photo-voice and spatial mapping techniques that have been
used to examine the urban experiences of marginalized women and girls, children and youth’s
experiences of everyday urban landscapes, and conceptualizations of health, this research will
engage youth in order to get at the reasons why youth like some recreational spaces and not
others, and what anxieties and empowerments are created in spatial locations. These methods
will produce a mapping device for policy makers who could then see activity spaces through the
eyes of those who use them.
The larger significance of this project has clear implications for health promotion policy and
practice and has the potential to develop and enhance innovative approaches to research about
youth’s sports participation in urban settings. More importantly, the findings will contribute to the
growing evidence about the relevance of environment, place and urban form to the health and
well-being of young Canadian urban populations.
SCRI 2007 Presentation Slides
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