Learning from the 2010 Vancouver winter Olympic Games about Aboriginal peoples of Canada

• Main Author: Aragon Ruiz, Antonio
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2008
• Subjects: Adult education; Olympic games; Visual culture; Critical pedagogy; Foucault; Aboriginal symbols; Freire; Anti-Olympic movement; Canada; inuit
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/3090

This research examines the ways in which the Vancouver Olympics emblem, an Inuit inuksuk, and other Aboriginal symbols have been ‘adopted’ by the organizers of the 2010 Winter Olympics, how visual and textual Aboriginal representations have been incorporated into the public education mandate of the Games, and how this relates to the Aboriginal Participation Goals of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC). I use Freirian critical cultural pedagogy and Foucauldian theories along with a visual research method, semiotic analysis, as a way to examine the material presented on the official Vancouver 2010 Olympic website and related websites.