Claustropolitanism, capitalism and Covid: Deviant leisure, un/popular culture, and a (post)work future (original) (raw)
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Leisure has many competing definitions as its practices and composition have evolved over time. Conventional renderings of leisure place it as '"residual time" left over outside of working hours' (Tucker, 1993, p. 16). However, as working hours have changed, definitions of leisure are in flux. The rise of a 'leisure industry' interfacing with contemporary notions of 'lifestyle' intersects popular culture, consumption and capital, to commodify time and space, interest and enthusiasm. During industrialism leisure was fought for as a space for self-determination, first encoded as personal time to pursue intimate or local interests and then later, to enable workers to enter into the consumer landscape of the middle class by indulging in public and semi-private pastimes that increasingly engaged cultures of exchange. The commodification of leisure has stimulated conspicuous consumption in the pursuit of pleasure and sensation, as shopping, purchase and exchange whether in tourism, serious leisure pursuits, listening to music or any other of the expanding myriad of
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Vol. 3, Iss. 2 (DHSI Conference & Colloquium 2021)
What does a robust and useful technological response to a crisis, aware and attentive to the biases and messages of digital media, look like? This paper responds to provocations and questions posed during our panel, Emergent-cy: Critical Digital Humanities in the Time of COVID at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2021 Conference & Colloquium, by attendees who particularly responded to the notion of "crisortunity" raised by Arun Jacob during the panel. This paper centres on crisortunity, a neologism coined by the cartoon The Simpsons in episode 11 of season 6 ("Fear") and since expanded upon by scholars like Tanner Mirrlees, within our different disciplines ("Ghoulish"). Crisortunity-a crisis situation that also presents the opportunity for someone to gain something in return-unifies our offerings to the digital humanities. While contributors to this paper come from a range of fields-museum studies, journalism studies, media studies, and research creation-our responses are linked by an attentiveness to the uneven precarities and vulnerabilities so often symptomatic of institutional responses to crises, as well as the production, circulation, and management of information. Building on critical work that explores the ways that technologies from electronic monitoring of those serving parole or awaiting trial (Benjamin) to electronic benefits transfer systems in the United States social service system (Eubanks) are mobilized to fix social problems, we argue that techno-fixes often fail to fix; instead, they reinstate unequal and inequitable relations in the name of repair. In contrast, when communities organize to respond to crises on their own, tensions may arise between attempts for selforganization and anti-capitalist modes of creating and community. This paper thus explores the implications of qualifying something as a "crisis" with a discrete beginning and end, and what it might mean to offer fixes to something that is broken rather than curating, managing, repairing, or caring for something that is not yet irreparable (Gál). By leveraging this concept across our four disciplines, we hope to explore the various uses of terming something a "crisis." While in the present context, the term crisis might bring to mind the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, crises can be financial, institutional, and/or architectural. For whom do crises toll? And for whom are they not crises at all, but opportunities to further leverage power, influence, and resources in the name of protecting investments? As we explore, care infrastructures are often depleted in favour of technofixes and precarious labour that continue, rather than break from, pre-crisis power structures and institutional modes. In our first section, Haley Bryant tackles the question of remediation during the COVID-19 pandemic in the museum field, where an accelerated focus on digital solutions warns of an increasing reliance on precarious labour and compromised practices of museological care. In the following section, Nelanthi Hewa examines how Substack and other newsletter platforms have positioned themselves as the saviours of journalism to ask whose crisis is solved, and whose is extended, when journalism is platformed. Camille Intson reflects on a research creation endeavour and international digital media gallery entitled Intermissions: Works for a New World, which emerged in response to the pandemic's impact on art and culture. In the final section, Arun Jacob discusses the infrastructural politics of the inherent techno-solutionism in crisis architecture.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has enfolded waves of uncertainty-intense doses of not knowing-into our daily experience. In this commentary, I stutter into the discomfort of not knowing as a mode of relation. Recognizing that the collective uncertainty surrounding the pandemic has marshaled vital desires to know how to respond, to cope, and even to survive, I think and write toward productive possibilities that arise when we tune attention away from knowing more and knowing better. The journey I take hitches to conceptual anchor points from settler colonial studies, and to moments of personal upheaval associated with both the current pandemic and learning to take responsibility for settler colonization. As I navigate this route of not knowing, I churn up potential decolonizing pathways for leisure researchers to debate, discard, pick up, or move through.
A People's Future of Leisure Studies: Leisure with the Enemy Under COVID-19
Leisure Sciences, 2020
To those of us who have been consistently critical of leisure, we have mapped our critique of leisure onto discussions of leisure as a concept, as a tool, or as a social construct in society that has had serious implications on the gendered, the racialized, and the classed as disposable. Leisure is a life-politic that hides: dominant lifestyles, harmful environmental engagement, and political regimes. But in the midst of pandemic, there are two enemies, at the mirco- and macro-level to the life of a person via leisure that are becoming exposed at this time: 1) Person to Person; and, 2) The State to Person. With the coronavirus pandemic, it reveals a need to depart from a happiness and titillation orientation of leisure, and more a collective life-giving requisite in our research, instruction, and advocacy. For with COVID-19, leisure (as it is predominantly conceived) is the enemy.
Digital Culture & Society (DCS) Vol 8, Issue 1/2022 – Coding Covid-19: The Rise of the App-Society, 2023
The article reflects on visualisations and aestheticisations of remote labour, i.e., working from home as a pandemic measure, through Internet photo-based memes. Drawing from Stuart Hall’s model of encoding and decoding and using visual discourse analysis, the article reflects critically on humorous approaches to remote labour and performing oneself as a labouring body at the times of COVID- 19. It explores the curious social aspects of physical alienation from one’s product of labour and colleagues, as well as the entanglement of workplace and private space. There is a paradox at play; there is the potential of convenience and informality, though simultaneously the labouring body is constantly present, potentially surveilled, expected to be always available. In this context, I am fascinated by the ways that this practice is encoded by memes and how these memes can be decoded either as political commentary to the situation or as oppositional / critical. Departing from my ongoing research at the University of Gothenburg, I categorise my empirical material in subclusters based on their theme, aesthetics, and rhetoric. The article thus focuses on remote labour pandemic memes which draw attention to the zoomification of labour: the liquification of space and time, the shared eerie intimacy with the boss and coworkers, the isolation and loneliness or the chaos of sharing the home and workspace, and the performativity of the zoom gaze. Additionally, it discusses remote labour memes which perform a direct critique on neoliberalism, by personifying the capital as the boss figure and by articulating humourous oppositional discourses against the exploitation, perhaps carrying themselves postcapitalist possibilities. In terms of theory, inspiration is drawn by the works of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Mark Fisher.
2015 “Bored Stiff: Sex and Superfluity in a Time of Crisis,” Public Culture 27(2): 387-406
This essay reflects upon the intimate entanglement of superfluity and boredom in post-Communist Bucharest, Romania, through an ethnographic analysis of an underground market for cheap sex. Inside a public restroom of a major transit station, homeless men manage a deeply felt sense of boredom at the level of consumption, trading in la petite mort in an effort to combat a deeply felt sense of la mort sociale. This essay takes this consumer-based response to radical exclusion as an opportunity to explore the subjective and affective dimensions of deepening poverty in a prolonged moment of neoliberal instability. The essay asks, ultimately, What kind of danger does boredom, and the inclination to manage that boredom through consumer practices, pose? This is a historical and ethnographic question that provides insight into the stiffening of class boundaries in Bucharest, but also in other similarly positioned cities in Eastern Europe and the global south.
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The aim of the research is to identify pathological relations between consumer culture and consumers. I explore the relation between people and objects, and the impact that images have as producers and disseminators of sign-value. Taking the term ‘advertisement’ loosely I refer to Dutch still-life paintings as advertisements for the craft-objects they depict and the lifestyles they suggest. The body is also considered to be an advertisement because of the commodities with which it is adorned and the socially prescribed ideals that it reinforces. I consider social networking sites as commercial spaces where body ideals are disseminated. Different forms of self-presentation, including selfies, thinspiration, and fat fetishism are examined as indications of the recuperation of aberrant signs in the system of sign-value exchange. The analytical methodology for this enquiry is framed by theories of commodity fetishism and sexual fetishism through which I consider both the socio-economic ...
Leisure Sciences, 2020
In countries currently under lockdown, schools and leisure facilities have closed their gates to the vast majority of children. Having to stay indoors for most of the day, children’s leisurescapes have been radically transformed. In these circumstances, instances have emerged from across the globe of children adapting to the lockdown in creative ways and constructing leisurescapes within the limits of the home, by putting up rainbows and teddy bears on windows and porches. Drawing upon media reports about children’s rainbow drawings and teddy bear hunts, in this paper, I deploy a sociological lens to demonstrate how children are using these leisure narratives as tools for participating in the wider conversation around the pandemic. At the same time, however, in pinning romanticized notions of hope and ‘national spirit’ upon the normative image of the child at play, media narratives are obfuscating the inequalities that fracture lived childhoods in the developed world.