Bird-Watching: Race, Gender, and Place in Outdoors Education

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: Grounding the "Natural" Boundaries of Curriculum

Abstract

Birdwatching is often presented as a gentle pastime and a gateway activity to conservation and environmental advocacy. This research explores the hidden assumptions about race, gender and place that are encoded in birdwatching public education programs. Black geographies and intersectional feminist political ecology are used as the conceptual frameworks, while acknowledging their friction with decolonial epistemologies in the North American context. The frameworks reveal how the presence of a Black birder disturbs the dominant white settler-colonial world view of nature, and the racialised and gendered and inequalities in birdwatching. The paper contributes to the debates on anti-racist and decolonial praxis in outdoors recreation and education.

Key words: Black geographies, birdwatching, outdoors education, race, outdoors recreation.

Author

• Jacqueline L. Scott, University of Toronto