Lifestyle Drugs and Late Capitalism: A Topography of Harm (original) (raw)
International Journal of Drug Policy, 2004
This paper will consider legal and illicit drug use in relation to changing leisure spaces, reflecting on different types of leisure space from the formal, controlled and purpose built licensed leisure locations of the modern urban landscape to the illicit, unregulated and wild zones beyond. Drawing on a range of literature, as well as empirical studies by the author, the historical and socio-cultural development of leisure space in relation to dance clubs, public houses and café bars in the UK will be considered. The relationship between spatiality, consumption, commercialisation and control is analysed through a consideration of changes in licensed leisure spaces; changes in the use of legal and illicit drugs within them; and state and commercial responses to these changes at local and national level. After pub and club space, the third and final consideration is the notion of head space, utilised and commodified in the pursuit of pleasure in late modern consumer society.
Leisure and health – critical commentary
Annals of Leisure Research, 2020
This critical commentary presents a selected overview of conceptual, theoretical and methodological trajectories in leisure and health. It includes critical scholarship about the meanings, politics and practices of health in the leisure sphere. The commentary illustrates the complex sociocultural and political character of leisure and human health relations. It argues that leisure studies scholarship as a critical and ethical form of inquiry, is strongly positioned to make a difference not only to leisure and health knowledge within the academy, but also to public health decision-making, and experiences of leisure-health practices around the world. The commentary concludes that future work in leisure and health needs to more explicitly and critically address the wider policy debates about the physical and mental health benefits of leisure beyond physical activity including critical examination of the potential negative health consequences of leisure.
Leisure and health: conjoined and contested concepts
Annals of Leisure Research, 2019
This paper explores the various ideas, notions and conversations that underpin the leisure/health nexus and focuses on identifying the interrelatedness and synergies between these concepts. There are competing understandings of ‘health’ that underpin the domains of leisure. Within these disciplines there are contrasting discussions involving biological, economic, environmental, historical, medical, political, psychological and sociological ways of constructing meaning. These occur in the domains of bio-medical treatment and health promotion framed within embodiment and embodiment practice. The bio-medical domain frames ‘health’ as the prevention of disease/illness/injury and views ‘leisure’ as a tool through which to reduce risk. While 21st century health promotion posits ‘health’ more holistically, ‘leisure’ still often focuses on issues related to individual’s physical ‘health’. In reality leisure and health are complex concepts that exist within a system of ebbs and flows that impact each other in different ways depending on your point of view.
Annals of Leisure Research Leisure and health: conjoined and contested concepts
Annals of Leisure Research, 2019
This paper explores the various ideas, notions and conversations that underpin the leisure/health nexus and focuses on identifying the interrelatedness and synergies between these concepts. There are competing understandings of ‘health’ that underpin the domains of leisure. Within these disciplines there are contrasting discussions involving biological, economic, environmental, historical, medical, political, psychological and sociological ways of constructing meaning. These occur in the domains of bio-medical treatment and health promotion framed within embodiment and embodiment practice. The bio-medical domain frames ‘health’ as the prevention of disease/illness/injury and views ‘leisure’ as a tool through which to reduce risk. While 21st century health promotion posits ‘health’ more holistically, ‘leisure’ still often focuses on issues related to individual’s physical ‘health’. In reality leisure and health are complex concepts that exist within a system of ebbs and flows that impact each other in different ways depending on your point of view.
Public and commercial leisure provision: active citizens and passive consumers?
Leisure Studies, 2000
In this paper we examine a "new" source of consumer vulnerability: the "secondary" consumption of harmful "micro" addictive products and the "primary" consumption of certain "macro" products that are the byproducts of our postindustrial civilization. We define consumer vulnerability of these products in relation to its cognates, disadvantage and detriment, introduce the theory of market imperfections to explain the factual domains of both "micro" and "macro" harmful products to identify the "new" vulnerable consumers, investigate the social concerns surrounding these products, and explore some feasible solutions for protecting them from their vulnerabilities.
Drawing upon insights from governmentality studies and risk theory this article explores how family leisure practices are governed through discourses about obesity and healthy lifestyles that circulate in Australian policies, institutions and popular culture. It argues that leisure practices are increasingly governed by discourses of risk calculation and moral responsibility within the context of the new prudentialism that characterises neo-liberal societies. Contemporary notions of freedom are produced through responsibilised leisure practices that emphasise particular kinds of individual and family conduct deemed important to a healthy lifestyle. Within Australian representations of the obesity problem and solutions there persists a heteronormative view of family life in which women are positioned as responsible for health. Lifestyle discourses that address risk through healthy leisure prescriptions overlook the effects of gender and class disparities, and in doing so limit the possibilities for different and more inclusive approaches to active living.
Leisure and Cultural Conflict in Twentieth-Century Britain
Sport in History, 2015
This volume, a collection of essays written by academics based in North America, Britain and Europe, is a good example of how far leisure history has travelled since this historical sub-discipline first gathered momentum in the 1970s. Where once leisure history was invariably approached through the framework of 'social control', seen for example in Peter Bailey's seminal monograph, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control 1830-1885 (1), leisure history is now less likely to be welded to such ideological moorings and floats more freely, approached through frameworks such as the 'body', 'gender', 'masculinity' and 'femininity' or perhaps the ways leisure reflects aspects of national or regional identity. Whilst this shift is partly due to a newer generation of historians working in the field, it is also certainly due to the shift in the attitudes of the British middle class to leisure by the 1920s and 1930s. In the 19th century they had had concerns that leisure was not often a blessing to the working class. By the 20th, they too were also enjoying the leisure boom, both as producers and consumers of commercial leisure, and were perhaps less condemnatory of the use of spare time. As the leisure historian Stephen Jones once noted, in the realm of arts, music and dancing, during the inter-war years, 'all social groups came together in their leisure'. This is not to suggest that social control is an irrelevant concept in the context of the 20th century, for while leisure was provided by the voluntary and commercial sectors, it was increasingly directed and facilitated by national government in its guise as both policeman and provider. The policing of popular culture continued in the shape of the 1906 Street Betting Act, for example, and popular leisure time pursuits (such as drinking) were also curtailed by the state in the Great War. In the inter-war years the state attempted to halt the encroachment of American popular culture, seen in the context of the Royal Commission and the subsequent Cinematograph Films Act (1927), which insisted on a percentage of British films being shown in the cinemas of the Empire. The emergence of the BBC under state control was also a feature of the inter-war era. The tendency for the state to intervene in order to 'prevent' did not disappear after 1945 either, particularly in the context of the permissive society and its aftermath, with government initiatives to curb football hooliganism in the 1970s and 1980s and to suppress counter-cultural cannabis consumption after 1967. By contrast, a series of more enabling acts in the 20th century encouraged those who wished to participate in the kind of rational leisure of which the Victorian middle class would have approved. The Right of Way Act (1932) and the Access to the Mountains Act (1938) were measures designed to aid rambling and trekking. The introduction of paid holidays for employed workers (1938) facilitated the already popular seaside holiday and also saw (as a counter to the dreaded Blackpool landlady) the rise of the holiday