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2018 NASSS Annual Conference
Sport Soundtrack: Sport, Music, & Culture
avatar for Jason Laurendeau

Jason Laurendeau

University of Lethbridge
“Do White People Dominate the Outdoors?”: MEC and “Diversity work”
“Do White People Dominate the Outdoors?”: MEC and “Diversity work”
The Canadian outdoor retailer Mountain Equipment Co-operative (MEC) has been capitalizing on adventures and the outdoors since 1971. Through advertisements, social media, and ambassadors, the company produces a specific “brand” that extends beyond material goods to valorize a particular (outdoorsy) way of life, and to produce related subjectivities. Moreover, MEC discourse normalizes certain relationships to outdoor places, and constructs a narrow range of bodies to be ‘at home’ in wilderness, all the while ignoring who has been displaced and dispossessed in the construction of “wild” spaces. In October of 2018, MEC publicly acknowledged its complicity in (some of) these processes, conceding that its own representational practices were “part of the problem.” Through this paper we engage in an intersectional interrogation of MEC’s representational practices, analyzing how MEC brings gender, race, ability, body type, and nation into being. Our analysis highlights that despite MEC’s diversity work, their representational practices continue to produce a narrow range of bodies appropriate to the wilderness. Moreover, we interrogate MEC’s silence around questions of land (dispossession), highlighting their participation in ongoing settler colonial violence.