Jeff Rose

University of Utah | UOU · Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism

Wildland fire smoke contributes to unhealthy indexes of particulate matter that impact human health. Research continues to document the effect of poor air quality on outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism, however, less is known about the relationship between smoke and tourism operations. The purpose of this research was to understand lived ex...

Regardless of age, transportation determines access to necessary services and supports, including food, healthcare, shelter, and social connection for persons experiencing homelessness (PEH). This study compared experiences and perceptions of transportation among PEH aged <49 years old to PEH aged 50+ years. We conducted a secondary qualitative dat...

Applied research aims to generate knowledge that can be used to improve policy and practice. In the field of visitor use management (VUM), researchers and park managers seek to generate knowledge regarding specific dimensions of visitor experiences within and across parks and other kinds of protected areas. A wide variety of management-centric ques...

People experiencing homelessness make extensive use of public greenspace, and recent years have seen increased interest in park agency-based strategies to address homelessness and its symptoms. However, there is a relative lack of literature addressing the equitable management of these spaces with consideration for park users experiencing homelessn...

Like other user groups, people experiencing homelessness utilize parks and other public spaces for a variety of reasons, including recreation/leisure, physical activity, socializing, and to enjoy time in nature. However, unlike other user groups, unhoused park users also often rely on parks as a setting to engage in a variety of necessary metabolic...

Attends to definitions of bias, subjectivity, positionality, reflexivity, and autoethnography for a leisure studies and qualitative research audience.

Climate change, including high temperatures, lack of moisture and extended fire-season, continues to be a key driver of the increased magnitude, duration, and frequency of wildfire activity across much of the Western U.S. Where there is wildfire, there is often smoke, leading to poor air quality. Short-term poor air quality events are both a perenn...

Regardless of age, transportation determines access to necessary services and supports, including food, healthcare, shelter, and social connection for persons experiencing homelessness (PEH). This study compared experiences and perceptions of transportation among PEH aged <49 years old to PEH aged 50+ years. We conducted a secondary qualitative dat...

The provision and siting of homeless emergency shelters have community-wide implications for addressing the needs of people experiencing homelessness (PEH). In Utah, Salt Lake County's transition from a large, centralized emergency shelter sited in a free transit zone to a decentralized scattered-site model outside of a no-cost transit zone provide...

The Dolores River is fed primarily by snowmelt from the western San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado. It travels 241 miles across the Colorado Plateau to its confluence with the Colorado River, near Moab, Utah, a major nature-based tourism destination in the U.S west. Water usage and climate change projections in the Dolores River Watershed,...

In the Colorado River Basin, annual weather variability and a changing climate complicate the management and allocation of water resources. As dynamic pressures alter this complex watershed, individual stakeholders make sense of these changes and form perceptions of the ecosystem services afforded under different conditions. We characterized recrea...

Anti-racist storytelling serves as a mechanism to expose the power dynamics and structural racism embedded in U.S. society. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how anti-racist storytelling can be germane to challenging the status quo in academia that allows inequities to exist. First, we begin by sharing and debriefing stories that illustrate...

The outdoor recreation industry faces the challenge of recruiting the next generation of professionals. This study examined factors that may influence young adults’ interest in outdoor recreation careers, including participation in organized and unorganized outdoor recreation as a youth, connection to nature (CTN), racial identity, and socioeconomi...

Despite steady increases in homelessness in the U.S., only recently has research on transportation needs and use for persons experiencing homelessness (PEH) been the focus of research endeavours. Moreover, limited research has identified how the geographic relocation of homeless community services and resources impacts the transportation needs of P...

Air quality concerns, like other environmental disamenities, are unevenly experienced across populations based on a variety of social and geographic markers, including those living at the urban economic and geographic margins. This study uses a narrative political ecology approach to document and analyze how people experiencing unsheltered homeless...

As human populations become concentrated in larger, more intensely urbanized areas connected through globalization, the relationships of cities to their surrounding landscapes are open to social, ecological, and economic reinterpretation. In particular, the value of access to nature in the form of nearby, undeveloped wildland to urban populations i...

The National Park Service (NPS) is the federal land management agency responsible for 423 units across the United States. Many of these parks are considered iconic cultural and environmental landscapes. However, scholarship from a number of disciplinary approaches has positioned the national parks and their management as problematic, particularly f...

Youth sport parents experience an array of emotions as part of their child’s youth sport experience. This may include emotions related to watching their child play, supporting their child’s emotions, or simply related to daily parenting responsibilities. This research examined youth sport parent emotions through an expressive writing exercise. Twel...

The Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) runs from Mexico to Canada across the western United States. Attempting to complete the entire trail (i.e. thru-hiking) is increasingly popular. We surveyed 560 PCT thru-hikers and found that 97% carried smartphones. This study examined backcountry smartphone use along the PCT. We assessed thru-hikers’ daily smartphone...

While homelessness, chronic homelessness, and other conditions of socioeconomic deprivation are widespread, there is increasing concern that individuals who have served with the U.S. military are particularly susceptible when returning to civilian life during their post-military engagement. Nearly 11 percent of all adults facing homelessness in 201...

While urban greenspaces play an important role in shaping the cultural and social dimensions of cities, these spaces are also inherently political, often serving to perpetuate the exclusion and subordination of racially marginalized populations. Drawing upon critical race theory, the purpose of this research is to use narratives to highlight how ra...

Ambient air pollution and rising global temperatures pose dual threats to the health and well-being of urban residents, in part, through dissuading them from engaging in healthy, outdoor physical activity. We leveraged a social-ecological systems (SES) framework to explain weather-dependent, outdoor recreation in the wildland-urban interface of Sal...

Experiences of homelessness, although widely varied, are characterized by extensive time in public spaces, often outdoors. However, there has been little empirical research about the ways in which environmental factors affect individuals experiencing homelessness (IEHs). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to use an environmental justice appro...

Experiences of homelessness, although widely varied, are characterized by extensive time in public spaces, often outdoors. However, there has been little empirical research about the ways in which environmental factors affect individuals experiencing homelessness (IEHs). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to use an environmental justice appro...

Climbers are mobilizing to collectively address challenges associated with their sport. In this paper, we argue that such challenges deserve greater attention, as do climbers’ responses to them. The argument is illustrated through three challenges: the “classic” self-governance challenge of divergent climber preferences regarding fixed hardware; th...

Outdoor adventure education utilizes expeditions and experiential education to provide students with opportunities for personal growth. However, by selling the possibility of adventure and character development, outdoor adventure education organizations unknowingly entangle the field with neoliberal ideologies. Neoliberalism is a political and econ...

In teaching for social justice, educators should not only consider what to teach, but also how to teach particular topics. Given that social justice work cannot be emotionally neutral, we articulate the power and beneficence of emotional pedagogies to leverage immersed, bodily experiences that engage student senses beyond cognition and rationality....

Research focused on the effect of place attachment on perceptions of increased recreational use and subsequent ecological impacts has illustrated mixed results. In some cases, place identity contributes to higher acceptance of pollution and litter; in others, it yields negative attitudes toward crowding and environmental degradation. We tested the...

Biopolitics is the power to control life. In the early global reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic, many people’s daily labor functions have been placed into stark relief, with a tripartite typology forming between those labor functions that are “essential,” those labor roles that have been lost, and those that have transitioned to an online format....

Researchers’ subjective positionalities are often presented as explanatory factors in the interpretation and analyses of ethnographic experiences. In geographic and anthropological ethnographies, positionalities are often benignly disclosed to readers under the auspices of being better able to understand specific subjective backgrounds, or the lens...

Issues of trustworthiness in qualitative leisure research, often demonstrated through particular techniques of reliability and/or validity, is often either nonexistent, unsubstantial, or unexplained. Rather than prescribing what reliability and/or validity should look like, researchers should attend to the overall trustworthiness of qualitative res...

This study explores the experiences and associated contexts of individuals who use a bicycle as their primary means of transportation in a metropolitan city in the United States. Using a qualitative approach, researchers employed semi-structured interviews to explore participants‘ narratives related to adopting cycling as a means of moving through...

Unsheltered homelessness has increasingly become a standard expectation as part of the contemporary urban landscape. This phenomenon is problematic for multiple reasons. Primarily, unsheltered homelessness is a concern because it represents a very real form of human suffering for the individuals facing homelessness. For the vast majority of people,...

Published in the International Journal of Wilderness at https://ijw.org/cognitive-costs-distract

Five hundred fourteen (514) surveys were conducted at three intercept points along the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) in California and Oregon to gather information about time on the trail, smartphone use, and their relationship to thru-hikers’ place attachment levels. Ninety-seven (97) percent of the thru-hikers surveyed carried smartphones and reporte...

When humans interact with nonhuman nature in seemingly normative ways, through consumption, recreation, admiration, romanticizing, etc., an imperfect but intact binary is often perpetuated; that is, humans are positioned as distinct from nature. Posthumanist political ecology destabilizes the human experience as the sole source of nature-society kn...

This study examined the results of the diversity and inclusion (D&I) survey administered to the Association of Outdoor Recreation and Education (AORE) membership in the fall of 2016. The purpose of the study was to discover the current perceptions and experiences regarding D&I of the AORE membership, which is made up primarily of outdoor education...

This mixed methods study explores the relative preference people in the United States have for sharing leisure space in their local urban parks with coyotes. Two rounds of survey data (n= 482) and a series of interviews (n= 28) were conducted. In both survey samples, people preferred to share park space with coyotes less than all other species opti...

Urban-proximate protected areas provide metropolitan residents with a variety of benefits. We explored the pursuit of clean air by winter outdoor recreationists who live in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area of northern Utah, a region that experiences seasonal air pollution events. To better understand how air quality in the Salt Lake Valley affe...

Open space and parks in urban and urban-proximate areas provide vital social, economic, and health benefits to people and communities. Specific benefits include offering opportunities for people to connect with nature, improving air quality, supporting wildlife habitat, and improving community identity and attachment. Management and maintenance of...

Past research has documented the harmful impacts of air pollution on endemic species, ecosystem functions, and human health. Far less is known about how degraded air quality influences the behaviors of visitors who frequent protected areas, such as National Parks. The aim of this study was to survey United States federal land management agency prof...

This article explores the intersection of politics and leisure, pointing to the fact that power has always been present in leisure activities, settings, practices, and institutions. In noting some of the past contributions of leisure scholarship, it also highlights a need for increasingly political leisure research, where knowledge production, epis...

This study explores sense of community (SOC) among low‐income college students. The development of a SOC among college students, especially low‐income students, may be particularly vital because of its implications for student success. Six low‐income Arizona State University students were selected based on receipt of a prestigious last‐dollar schol...

Background: Although outdoor education provides many positive learning outcomes for students, it is a field in which women continue to be underrepresented in leadership roles. Centering the voices of women and other underrepresented populations is critical to creating a more inclusive outdoor education field. Purpose: The purpose of this study was...

Unsheltered homelessness in the United States forces hundreds of thousands of people to sleep, eat, and live in the public sphere. Urban parks often become temporary homes for individuals facing poverty, substance addiction, mental illness, servitude, and other social concerns. For individuals facing homelessness, these parks are primary sources of...

Park managers are increasingly faced with responding to the recent rise of those experiencing unsheltered homelessness residing in urban green spaces. In response, researchers have explored and attempted to mitigate a variety of negative social and ecological impacts associated with unsheltered homelessness in urban parks. However, these impacts ar...

Air pollution is one of the greatest environmental health risks facing people worldwide. The transboundary nature of air pollution may place park and protected area (PPA) resources, as well as visitors, at risk of exposure to the same harmful pollutants that plague urban populations. Despite our knowledge of the various impacts of air pollution on...

In the Anthropocene, an age where the Earth is most clearly defined by human impacts on the planet, there is growing pressure to find more sustainable social, political, and environmental relations. Calls for greater sustainability have existed for decades, yet have consistently been embedded in capitalist processes and narratives that dilute their...

We explore the sensory experiences of individuals who live, work, and play in an environment marred by air pollution. Sensory phenomenology provides a theoretical lens through which to analyze the experiences of residents living with and through air pollution events in the Salt Lake metropolitan area, Utah. Excerpts from ten essays are presented to...

Understanding human movement and behavior in parks and protected areas is an integral part of managing social-ecological systems. In particular, spatial travel patterns of recreationists and their impacts on ecosystems have been studied in many protected area contexts. However, there is limited knowledge of recreation behavior in areas with little...

A considerable amount of leisure studies scholarship over the past half-century implicates ‘nature’ taking a prominent role in leisure studies scholarship. Most often in leisure-oriented literature, nature takes the form of an inert, unproblematic backdrop upon which human leisure experiences take place, in deference to the individual experience in...

Geographical relocation may create a number of adjustment issues for individuals including isolation and loneliness. For some, cheering for a team and being part of a fan group may be one way to address these issues and development a sense of community (SOC). The development of SOC, however, may be complicated when individuals no longer live near t...

Community engagement curricula and course design can provide substantial experiences for both community members and participating students. Using a case study approach, this research focuses on four steps in this process: initial community relationship forming, engaging in community service, transitioning to civic engagement, and developing a commu...

Engaging with feminist political ecology and leveraging experiences from a 16-month critical ethnography, this research explores ways in which masculinities served as both a rationale and an outcome of men facing homelessness living in the margins of an urban municipal public park – a space known as ‘the Hillside.’ Ethnographic narratives point to...

Dominant development discourses often proclaim promises of economic prosperity and global inclusion, while actually disenfranchising local cultures in the Global South from their traditional environments. In Latin America, and specifically Chile, development manifests itself through neoliberal economic policies implemented in the late twentieth cen...

A familiar narrative of an objectified relationship with nonhuman nature in Western thought, and especially in nature-society discourses in the United States, adheres closely to a notion of an environmental original sin. In this narrative, humans, by our very existence on the planet, have made nature dirty; we have made the natural world a little l...

This article engages directly with a group of individuals who reside in and among the margins of an urban municipal park, through a 16-month critical ethnography. Facing abject poverty, threats from law enforcement, and trials of living outdoors, these 'Hillside residents' cite the local health department as a primary source of potential displaceme...

Effective sustainability education is constrained, in part, by an inability to consistently define what it is, who it is for, and how it can best address present-day concerns. Often reduced to a set of behaviors with a future orientation for intergenerational security, sustainability loses the immediacy and importance of issues like hunger, homeles...

Thousands of tourists venture to the internationally renowned Galapagos Islands each year to admire the same pristine nature Darwin came upon over 150 years ago. While appreciating the landscape, many visitors fail to understand the interconnectedness of the tourism industry, Galapagos conservation efforts, and development on the inhabited islands...

Illegal marijuana cultivation on public lands is a complex social and ecological concern increasingly encountered by managers and federal officials. The negative ecological impacts of remote marijuana grow sites are in the nascent stages of scientific understanding; therefore, systematic inquiry into management perspectives about this issue lacks e...

This paper examines the ways in which guides contribute to creating value to clients. The context is nature-based adventure tourism in the specific mediums of mountain bike and backcountry ski tours in Utah and Idaho, USA. Qualitative interviews of clients and guides combined with participant observations are used to explore how guides interact wit...

This research critically examines ways in which highly popular yet relatively under theorised leisure experiences inform and are informed by the social and political governance of our everyday lives. Specifically, online social networking, as seen through Facebook, actively produces leisure spaces, even if these spaces are primarily constituted thr...

Everyday experiences of the Hillside residents, individuals facing homelessness while living in a municipal park, provide a context of inquiry for both social and environmental justice. Ethnographic exploration of this sociopolitical and socioenvironmental setting illustrates the onto-logical complexities surrounding constructions of the nonhuman w...

While education for sustainability is a critical task that is gaining ground in a plethora of educational contexts, it is frequently rendered ineffective in the face of neoliberal practice and discourse. Here we examine the pervasive impacts of neoliberalism on education for sustainability, looking specifically at discursive formations that shape o...

The need to better understand terrain in mountainous environments can lead directly to improved communication and management during outdoor recreation, education, and leadership experiences. Theories of risk and spatial cognition assist in explaining why terrain and exposure are inextricably connected. However, popular constructions of terrain in a...

Critical theorists have long examined cultural processes and their often deleterious effects on social and political movements. Using Kracauer's mass ornament and Bourdieu's construct of habitus, this study empirically investigates political participation and e-mobilization of civil society in the United States' "democratic" regime. Through examini...

Through narrative and critique, this critical analysis addresses the role and reification of privilege in the pedagogical processes of experiential education. Using whiteness as a critical and theoretical lens, we argue experiential education is a privileged pedagogy, aimed at maintaining the status quo and reproducing dominant power relations betw...

In this essay, we examine the assumptions underlying natural science, social science, and the humanities. More specifically, we suggest that social science in general and leisure science in particular be guided by a different set of assumptions than those guiding natural science and the humanities. Drawing on the Aristotelian idea of phronesis, we...

This article summarizes the content of a three-day administrative summit held at Zion Ponderosa Resort in southern Utah in late September 2010. Department chairs, heads, and deans representing 13 universities across North America offering leisure studies doctoral degrees, master's degrees, and undergraduate professional preparation degrees gathered...

Adrienne Cachelin is an adjunct faculty member with the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism at the University of Utah. Her academic interests include language framing, critical environmental education, and environmental justice. Jeff Rose is a fourth year doctoral student in the Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Department at the University o...

Public universities face critical challenges in terms of teaching, researching, and providing service. Funding mechanisms for various departments, programs, and professors have become increasingly intertwined with market-driven forces in light of neoliberal political and economic philosophies. In this essay, we illuminate neoliberalism and its mult...