Transnational Boarding Bodies: Travel, Tourism, and Lifestyle Sport Migration“Snowboarders’ experiences of travel and lifestyle sport migration influence their sense of cultural, national and gender identity and reflexivity” (Thorpe, p. 191). Even while humans travel and migrate, they are “inextricably entangled with the material and social relations in local places” (Thorpe, p. 217).Transnationalism: “systems of ties, interactions, exchange, mobility linking people and institutions across the borders of nation states. . .cultural interconnections reach across the world” (Thorpe, p. 193). “Human mobility contributes to a transnational imaginary” (Thorpe, p. 194 quoting Wilson & Dissanayake).“traveling cultures, traveling selves”/ “sociology of mobilities” paradigms (understand and study travel in terms of the sociology of groups of people). “diasporic experiences”; “diaspora” (group of people who live outside the area from where they are from or in which their ancestors lived)Lifestyle sport migrants: commitment to a sport organizes participants’ whole lives; participating in the particular sport is a way of life. Transnational flows of youth cultural participation Who works? Who pays? Who plays? (Un)settling experiences of lifestyle sport migration Independent solo travel affords empowerment especially to female snowboarders.Narratives of transformation and reflexivity (see 8a on travel) Critique: Be wary of romanticizing the effects of transnationalism and lifestyle migration. Such travel may keep travelers in their own bounded communities (they are oblivious to local, regional and national differences) Difficulties with retirement, immobility, life stages transitionsVirtual travel (Facebook, email, magazines, websites, real-time film and communication) Belonging through memory, nostalgia, imagination. Lifestyle sport migrants share similar experiences (see Thorpe, p. 211). All part of transnational imaginary (lifestyle snowboarders share memory, nostalgia, connection)Cultural “hot spots”: Mountain resorts such as Chamonix, France Queenstown, New Zealand Whistler, Canada At the hot spots, “cultural hierarchies are contested, negotiated, and reinforced. . . Some groups and individuals engage in an array of overt and covert practices to regulate the allocation of capital (symbolic, cultural, economic, social, linguistic, national, and gender) within local fields” (Thorpe, p. 216). (networks of power)Films are cultural artifacts used in the course this week to map and highlight some aspects of the traveling cultures/ sociology of mobilities