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Graduate Students

SVENSON, Stephen

 

Department of Sociology
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario
N2L 3G1

Email: srsvenso@uwaterloo.ca

Degrees:

PhD Candidate
MA: University of Waterloo (Sociology)
BES: (Honours): University of Waterloo

Research Interests:

 

As a researcher on the CIHR funded City Life and Well-Being: The Grey Zone of Health and Illness http://www.greyzone.uwaterloo.ca/index.html I am interested in the nexus of leisure, health, and community and what this reveals about our contemporary society. My work has examined the nature and meanings of various leisure practices, including cottaging, volunteer tourism, online gaming, and festivals.  

Dissertation Title:  Tracing the Leisure Imaginary

 

My dissertation proposes, following Charles Taylor’s construction of the ‘social imaginary,’ that the broad field of leisure behaviour can be productively understood through what I develop as the ‘leisure imaginary’. I am particularly interested in how questions of health and the good are bound up in the leisure imaginary and how contemporary leisure practices reflect the desire of the 'modern' subject to orient to leisure as an intervention in the health of the individual or collective.

Dissertation Committee:

Kieran Bonner (Supervisor), Lorne Dawson, Alun Blum, Bryan Smale

Recent Publications:

2011

Svenson, S. and C. Ruf. (2011) “Life and Death in New Orleans: Disaster Tours Imagined” in Tristanne Connolly (ed.) Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability, UK: Intellect Press.

2009

Svenson, S. (Director). (2009). Conflicting Prescriptions: Tales of Intervention in the Lower 9th Ward. [Video Documentary]. (Available from Grey Zone Productions, University of Waterloo)

Related Employment

Currently teaching at UBC in the Okanagan Valley in Sociology at the Barber School of Arts and Sciences