Barbara Barnes

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.