‘The endless winter’: transnational mobilities of skilled snow sport workers

ABSTRACT

This article takes up Newman and Falcous’ (2012) challenge to move sport migration studies beyond the career-based travels of the sporting elite and to ‘cultivate new accounts of the affects of global sport mobility on the experiences’ of a wide range of people involved in sporting cultures and industries (48). Working at the intersection of sport migration and lifestyle mobilities scholarship, this paper focuses on the seasonal migration experiences of passionate skiers and snowboarders who have dedicated many years to working in ski resorts as instructors, terrain park-crew, and managers. Drawing primarily upon in-depth interviews with six long-term snow sport workers, the author examines the opportunities, constraints and negotiations of those following the winter between the hemispheres for work and leisure, as well as those who have transitioned out of this highly mobile career. She concludes by examining how snow sport participants’ transnational experiences influence their emotional connections to place and understandings of ‘home’ well after their careers in the snow sport industry have come to an end.

KEYWORDS:

• Snow sports
• seasonal migration
• lifestyle mobilities
• transnational subjectivities

Acknowledgements

The Author would like to thank the six participants who so generously shared their experiences of snow sport migration with her, and the many other 'snow bums' who have informed and supported this project in many different ways. Thanks also to the Editors and Reviewers of Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies for their helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. Finally, thanks to the University of Waikato Faculty of Education Research and Leave Committee for support that enabled this project to take place.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this paper I use Global North and Global South to refer to ‘two broad geopolitical groupings with the North representing richer “more advanced” economies and the South referring to the regions that were characterised in the 1970s as “Third World” nations’ (Shain 2013, 12).

2. Although my own background is not a focus of this paper, elsewhere I have offered an extensive reflexive discussion of my past experiences as a snowboarding migrant and athlete, and how this enabled/constrained my ethnographic research (Thorpe 2011).

3. I do not consider snow sport migrants to be a ‘diaspora’ in the same way that Appadurai and Breckenridge (1989) used the term. However, various others (i.e. Cohen 1996; Vertovec 1999) are using diaspora more broadly to refer to a shared sense of community or belonging that does not necessarily have to be tied to place.