A People's History of Leisure Studies: A Historiography of Four Traditions of Critical Leisure Studies (original) (raw)
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Becoming Political: An Expanding Role for Critical Leisure Studies
This article explores the intersection of politics and leisure, pointing to the fact that power has always been present in leisure activities, settings, practices, and institutions. In noting some of the past contributions of leisure scholarship, it also highlights a need for increasingly political leisure research, where knowledge production, epistemologies, and methodologies help unpack multiple critical leisures. Using engagements with Foucauldian biopolitics, political ecology, and radical political thought, this article sets the stage for the eight manuscripts that engage with critical components of political dimensions of leisure. In light of the pressing catastrophes of our time, we contend that scholars and educators can and should be engaged in building a more critically diverse and intellectually productive academy.
Decentring Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory
1999
Leisure studies is like an old clock that stops ticking from time to time and needs to be shaken to get it working once again, and if that does not do the trick, opened up and disassembled, its gears, springs, sprockets and levers cleaned, oiled, and its 'movement'the clock's condition embodied in its 'tick-tock' soundmade to run in an even balanced beat. Unlike clockmenders, scholars overhaul subject fields by leaving parts behind that after decades of use have become unnecessary to their workings, replacing these with new ones. They cannot afford to be sentimental when it comes to replacing old parts; if getting the clock back 'in beat' is the objective, then it is best to replace what no longer works. This gives us the impression that things in our subject field change while ostensibly remaining the sameeven if this is not really the case. Just over two decades ago, Chris Rojek published Decentring Leisure, the fruit of his attempt to overhaul leisure studies. This book changed our understanding of leisure forever. Like clockmending, it is a study that draws parallels with deconstructionism. This term is derived from the work of Jacques Derrida, a philosopher with a uniquely sharpened ability for remedying subject fields that have lost their beat. If the job of the clock-mender is to disassemble the 'movement' in a clock, work on it, and then put it all back together again, the job of deconstructionism is to disassemble and reassemble subject fields; that is, take them apart, to not only demonstrate how they are necessarily contingent to time and place, but also to reveal the gaps and absences they render unintelligible. Deconstructionism works with the assumption that all subject fields contain hidden and unexpected meanings, which often signify points of resistance. In this regard its central aim is to show how subject fields do not come up to scratch under their own terms of reference. A successful deconstruction not only changes a subject field, but it also conceives new ways of seeing. Rojek's study is a deconstruction of leisure studies in the sense that not only does it call for a critique of taken for granted assumptions made about leisure, but it also prompts changes in our perceptions about the potential and the limits of leisure studies. Leisure studies after Decentring Leisure was supposed to be business as usual and a return to normality but in reality it was just the opposite. It is the norm in leisure studies to adapt Tolstoy's famous sentence about families and say that good books tend to be good in the same ways. Certainly, if you encounter something that is radically different you are liable to suspect, and perhaps to go on suspecting, that it is different because it is not good. Tolstoy also wrote that the greatest threat to life is habit. Habit, he argued, destroys everything around us. By familiarizing us to the point that we no longer really see anymore, habit destroys our critical faculties. In his important book Thinking Sociologically (1990) the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that the cure for habit is defamiliarization. In opening up leisure studies to new and previously unanticipated possibilities Decentring Leisure restores leisure studies for us, by remedying the blindness, so that we come to see what it is that is important about leisure in the contemporary world. In so doing it brings the furniture of the critical imagination back into focus. The idea of 'decentring' leisure not only assumes that leisure studies is a discursive formation that exists independently of individual leisure scholars, but also that it should go about its day-today business by undermining the significance of its own unifying centre
The Leisure Studies Association: past, present and future
2015
The Leisure Studies Association completed in 2015 40 years since its creation and its history intertwines with the history of leisure research and its development. The focus of this article is on the past, present and future of the association. The article starts analysing the 40 years of the organisation and its contributions to the field explaining the developments and its current structure and objectives. In 40 years the Leisure Studies Association offered an immense contribution to the field with its journal Leisure Studies, the publication of over 120 books and the organisation of its annual conference and multiple workshops and seminars. The final part of this paper looks to the future of the association and the leisure studies as well as to the obstacles to be overcome considering the current situation and characteristics of higher education.
This special 40th anniversary issue focuses on where leisure sciences (as a field) and Leisure Sciences (as a journal) started and what the future might hold for both. As such, we have provided a space for dialogue, debate, critique, and reflection relating to leisure studies' progress and future. Authors were asked to consider and write about key issues and controversies of the field, developments we should be celebrating, and directions of study we should be pursing. The call for this special issue also asked scholars to consider research gaps that exist, issues we should be thinking about, and where we are now in relation to where previous projections expected. Reflection on the progress of Leisure Sciences over the past 40 years and its role in advancing the field of leisure research was also encouraged.
Leisure Studies Reclaiming the 'L' word: Leisure Studies and UK Higher Education in neoliberal times
2017
Leisure is a major sphere of both private and public life. It is thus of concern that the identity and profile of Leisure Studies in the Higher Education curricula of the United Kingdom have declined in prominence over the past decade. This trend is not peculiar to Leisure Studies; the social sciences as a whole are threatened by a neoliberal economic discourse which increasingly informs Higher Education strategic management. The aim of this article is to investigate the impacts of the declining status of Leisure Studies as experienced by lecturers and researchers in the subject field. It is based upon a project commissioned by the Higher Education Academy in 2015. It was found that Leisure Studies faces two principal challenges. The first is to re-establish its status as a subject field within the social sciences, the second is to ensure it retains a relevance to leisure practice, particularly in terms of the management of its provision. The article proposes greater academic engagement in ideational ‘border crossings’ to advance thinking on leisure in the social sciences and to explore opportunities for collaboration within them. We conclude that Leisure Studies arguably suffers from a crisis of representation, as opposed to a crisis of relevance.
Echoes of Leisure: Questions, Challenges, and Potentials
Journal of Leisure Research, 2000
Gregorian calendars, love of linear and progressive forms, Christian beliefs, and fascination with "new" beginnings all intermix to form the concept of millenium. Calendars emerging from Tibetan, Islamic, Hawaiian, Mayan, and other traditions mark no day of celebration or sorrow for January 1, 2000 (and whether this is the first day of the new millenium is still contested). Without conscious attention to the plurality of calendars, concepts of time, historical events, and holidays, it is tempting to view the millenium as an "inevitable given," a reality, a natural occurrence. As any good leisure scholar understands, the millenium provides a wonderful excuse for celebration, contemplation, and play. However, thoughtful attention to plurality, opens new possibilities and engenders other concerns and questions. How do we, in both large and small ways, render invisible other views while celebrating one, albeit dominant, perspective? How do we become accountable for validating and giving support to a single interpretation of reality? Can leisure become focused on fulfillment and re-figuring social bodies/ minds/ souls? Can leisure become inevitably tied to notions of collaborative interpretations rather than predominant and increasingly individual, subjective conscience? I am particularly concerned about creating ethical, meaningful leisure in a paradoxical world of plurality and commonality. How do we, as leisure scholars and practitioners, connected to, or reinforcing, dominant structures and processes, maintain and honor the presence, values, and critiques of alternative perspectives? What leisure praxis will enable "games of truth and power" to be practiced with minimal domination and maximal freedom? How can we transfigure our relationship to powers and knowledges that render us calculable and entangled in harm to others? Seemingly innocent millenium celebrations provide resonance with profound conflicts related to power, dominant structures, and alternative perspectives of leisure. The definitions, parameters, and actions related to leisure are constructed and molded by invisible forces related to cultural dynamics, power relations, collective processes, and societal frameworks. It is no accident, therefore, that freedom and individual perspectives and behaviour are essential features of leisure praxis
An outline of the action approach to leisure studies
Leisure Studies, 2005
This paper is a position paper. It seeks to set a new and distinctive approach to the study of leisure that combines theory, practice and ethics. It stands on the shoulders of 'action sociology', as represented in the Weberian tradition, and symbolic interactionism. But it offers a radical renewal of this perspective by relating action to 'embodiment', 'emplacement', 'location' and 'context', and repositioning leisure studies in relation to 'care for the self' and 'care for the other'. The paper is concerned to elucidate a renewed action approach and to demonstrate its value for the study of leisure. It does not aim to compare or contrast this approach systematically with other positions in the field. The action approach identifies 'testing' to be a duty of all theoretical propositions. It regards leisure to be intrinsically political. The paper distinguishes the differences between postmodernism and the action approach. The paper ends with a suggested research agenda.
Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure – Meanings, Motives and Lifelong Learning [Book Review]
Anatolia: An International Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research, 2014
Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure proposes that we are entering into a new phase of leisure, brought about by the social, cultural and technological changes taking place in modern societies. While the editors acknowledge that change has always existed, they call out the pace of change and the manner in which leisure is consumed as key differentiators from the past. The book examines the key debates in leisure centered on three themes: meanings, motives and lifelong learnings. In doing so, Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure seeks to better understand the relationship between leisure and the individual, and the ways in which people look at and make sense of the world around them. A surprisingly moving experience, the book will resonate with those who have engaged in leisure experiences which have left them wanting something more, the exact nature of which they are unsure.
Consuming Leisure not so Leisurely: Political Economy of Leisure and Desire
2018
The paper examines the contemporary contours of leisure through an inclusive parameter by exploring the ‘frontiers’ of leisure that signifies the fluidity of leisure practices. Mapping the chaotic Indian leisure landscape through the theoretical framework of political economy of leisure and desire, and leisure as an object of desire, the paper raises the question of consumption and the ownership of what one consumes within the social class locations. These concerns are explicated through an examination of political economy of leisure and desire; consumption of leisure; colonialism, elite, subaltern and leisure; post-colonial entangled contexts; two case studies on subaltern and leisure; and consuming desirable ‘leisure for religion’ unleisurely by exploring the social landscape under perceived/real religio-communal siege-like situation with reference to the controversial Indian Islamic preacher Zakir Naik; and the question of Halal meat.