Program > Friday > 10:30 > Session 1. Protecting vulnerable workers (1/2)

Paper: Playing where you work: Rural Newfoundland youth and intersections of work, play, and health

Author(s) and Affiliation(s):
Moss E. Norman, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Nicole Power, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Kathryne Dupre, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Arla Day, St Mary's University
Session : 1. Protecting vulnerable workers (1/2)
Day/Time: Friday at 10:30
Room: Ballroom, 2nd Floor
Objectives:

While there is an emerging body of research on youth, rurality, and work experience (McGrath, 2001; Shucksmith, 2004), on the one hand, and youth, rurality, and recreation (Kenway and Hickey-Moody, 2009; Shoveler, Johnson, Prkachin, and Patrick, 2007), on the other, there is scant research that brings the two together and explores the intersections of rural youth, work, and recreation. Using data collected as part of the Community-University Research for Recovery Alliance (CURRA) initiative at Memorial University, this paper examines how youth (19-24 years) living in rural communities on the west coast of Newfoundland experience work and recreation relationally and the health implications associated with this relationship.

Methods:

The research employs multiple methods including qualitative interviewing and focus groups as well as a quantitative surveys. This paper focuses on results drawn from the qualitative research.

Results:

The paper argues that youth have deep, albeit ambivalent, emotional, symbolic, and material-economic investments in the commercial consumer outlets located in their communities, and position them as complex sights of play, recreation, community identification, as well as places of employment. Indeed, while youth understand and articulate the relative success of their communities in and through such retail consumer establishments, at the same time, they see them as offering “bad” jobs, suggesting that they are poor paying, degrading and, in some cases, outright unsafe. For these youth, work and recreation reside at the interface of local and global forces, a phenomenon that increasingly characterizes work relations more broadly within a changing world.

Conclusions:

This paper concludes by suggesting that the tension between consumer retail establishments as both spaces of play and places of work is a fruitful one for getting at the intersections of rural youth, recreation, and occupational health.

References:

Kenway, J. & Hickey-Moody, A. (2009). Spatialized leisure-pleasures, global flows and masculine distinctions. Social & Cultural Geography, 10(8), 837-852.
McGrath, B. (2001). "A problem of resources": defining rural youth encounters in education, work & housing. Journal of Rural Studies, 17(4), 481-495.
Shoveller, J., Johnson, J., Prkachin, K. & Patrick, D. (2007). "Around here, they roll up the sidewalks at night": a qualitative study of youth living in a rural Canadian community. Health & Place, 13, 826-838.
Shucksmith, M. (2004). Young people and social exclusion in rural areas. Sociologica Ruralis, 44(1), 43-59.