Parks in Praxis: Perspectives on the Frontlines of the Racial Justice Movement in America

Open Access
- Author:
- Tallon, Aubrey
- Graduate Program:
- Recreation, Park and Tourism Management
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- February 25, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Peter Newman, Program Head/Chair
Alan R Graefe, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Andrew J. Mowan, Committee Member
Kathryn J. Brasier, Committee Member - Keywords:
- race
justice
racial justice
parks
recreation
protests - Abstract:
- Following the death of George Floyd in May 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, a nationwide series of protests and collective action events accompanied renewed calls to critically assess systemic racism present in United States institutions. Many of these events made use of public park space as a staging ground for civic action and engagement. This work examines two well-publicized events of the movement, the George Floyd Square and Cal Anderson Park occupations, and uses publicly available Twitter data to analyze how collective action organizers, attendees, and supporters represented their relationships with public space and parks they inhabited. Using a combination of inductive and deductive coding, this exploratory work qualitatively examined 1,260 tweets from George Floyd Square, and 1,133 tweets from Cal Anderson Park. From these tweets a series of main themes, including community, power, security, resistance, reclamation, and survival, was established. Contrasting these events as two distinct modes of collective action (occupation of a public park, and creation of a public park), this work examines how participants use online spaces to discuss creation and re-making of space as protest in the racial justice movement. To conclude, it calls on parks professionals and leisure academics to expand their perspectives to include community-created park space, and encourages collaboration with community stakeholders for both research and parks management initiatives.