Marine safety education initiatives are most often constructed along rational
functionalist lines that tend to assume that accidents and deaths that accompany them are
caused by lack of appropriate technical knowledge, equipment failure or the irrational
behaviour of participants. One sector identified by this research, which seems to have a
disproportionally high rate of involvement in these incidents, is that of small open skiffs <
5.5m - usually made from aluminum. Most of these incidents take place on the inland
waterways of the Canadian Shield.
I look at the activity from the perspective of two separate but parallel discourses on
the topic: the official discourse as portrayed by the Canadian Coast Guard, Search and
Rescue, the Power and Sail Squadrons, the Canadian Red Cross and various police forces and
the popular discourse as seen in lifestyle commercials, advertising catalogues, outdoors
sporting goods shows and sports television. I suggest throughout that gender, race and
economic marginality are powerful influences that must be factored into our educative efforts
if we, the Canadian boating public, are to reduce the number of fatalities.
The construction of the subjectivites of the participants will be considered in the
context of several competing conceptions concerning the nature of Nature in the postmodern
era. A form of narrative analysis known as deconstruction is used to interrogate the
theoretical foundations of the textual artefacts. I use postcolonial theory to develop a
distinctively Canadian narrative concerning the underpinnings of a reconceptualized marine
safety education. In the final section, some considerations for extending this work into other
areas of wilderness recreation were explored.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/5699 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Rosenthal, Alex |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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