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Barbara Barnes' current work examines the production of normalized and
embodied national identities through the emotional appeal of outdoor
adventure sport and travel in both practice and representation. She
completed a dissertation entitled "Global Extremes: Spectacles of
Wilderness Adventure, Endless Frontiers, & American Dreams" in December
2006 at the University of California Santa Cruz that used multiple methods
(i.e., ethnography, media analysis, cultural history) to examine the
cultural-historical significance of outdoor adventure in the United States
during the final decades of the twentieth century. It argued that these
practices and their televisual representations recall the mythologies of
frontier wilderness spaces and all they have historically represented in
U.S. national memories; e.g., equality of opportunity, national innocence,
individual "freedom," and a space into which the imagined and physical
nation, and the bodies seen to belong to it, could travel in pursuit of
American Dreams. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on
her dissertation research, and has published articles related to her
research interests in national identities, mobile bodies, and the meanings
of landscapes. She teaches courses on the body, gender and health,
cultural studies, feminist research methods, and making national
identities.
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