Abstract

Drawing on six months of fieldwork carried out in Edinburgh, Scotland, this thesis focuses on young Canadians who held working-holidaymaker visas for the United Kingdom and who were living in Scotland over the summer and fall of 2006. Based on both an analysis of my ethnographic data as well as a review of relevant literature on tourism, youth travel, and social capital, I propose that with regards to Canadian working-holidaymakers in the UK, travel is a self-imposed rite of passage which serves as a means of transitioning from one life-stage to another, and moreover that the decision to experience life overseas often coincides with a change in status in the Canadian context. I also show that working-holidays are ironic when juxtaposed with conventional understandings of tourism and work as mutually exclusive, and therefore question an assumption that pervades much literature on travel, namely that tourism and work are antithetical.