Professor Mowatt is a member of the Department of Park, Recreation, and Tourism Studies. His teaching and research interests range from management of sports complexes, park districts, tourism departments, and event planning firms to diversity and leadership development to violence in leisure settings. While not in deep thought about the nature of the world today, you can find him moonlighting as a disc jockey.
Courses
Violence, Sport, and the Spectator: An Exploration of Violence in Modern Society
This course will explore how sport, and violence, are positive and negative experiencesand their impact in daily life. For example, Olympic history, professional sport involvement, recreational sport activities, historical events, and gatherings demonstrate the existence of violence and deviance in a leisure arena. While those occurrences may be shocking, it is through examining violence that there is a way to discover how to intervene in the cycle of violence that affects a community.
People experience violence in many different ways, however, the degree of violence that most people experience that is associated with average, everyday activitiessuch as those associated with the sport fielddo not realize that they can be personally affected by such events and activities. This course is designed to explore the role and relationship of violence with these activities, as well as the messages one learns in viewing such actions.
Through discussion teaching techniques, such as the Socratic method, fish bowl technique, and group projects, this course will explore the roots of violence from the context of leisure. A foundation in the theoretical framework of sport in society will be established through a sociological, psychological, historical, and anthropological view of violence in many societies. This viewpoint reveals links to leisure as accelerating or mitigating effects on people of all ages, cultures, and interests. There will also be discussions on the impact of violent leisure activities on women, populations of color, persons with a disability, and people of different sexual orientations. Actual events will be analyzed, as well as research will be conducted, that explores the role of violence in society and the potential solutions to curb its existence. The course will conclude with a review of resources that relate to the solutions to violence in leisure settings in society and a potential service learning opportunity connected to the impact of violence in society.
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