Deviant leisure book review (original) (raw)
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DEVIANT LEISURE: A CRIMINOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
This article explains why an understanding of deviant leisure is significant for criminology. Through reorienting our understanding of 'deviance' from a contravention of norms and values to encompassing engagement in behavior and actions that contravene a moral 'duty to the other', the new 'deviant leisure' perspective outlined here, describes activities that through their adherence to cultural values inscribed by consumer capitalism, have the potential to result in harm. Using the ideological primacy of consumer capitalism as a point of departure, we explore the potential for harm that lies beneath the surface of even the most embedded and culturally accepted forms of leisure. Such an explanation requires a reading that brings into focus the subjective, socially corrosive, environmental and embedded harms that arise as a result of the commodification of leisure. In this way, this article aims to act as a conceptual foundation for diverse yet coherent research into deviant leisure.
The Deviant Leisure Perspective: A Theoretical Introduction
This chapter outlines the intellectual origins and theoretical foundations of the burgeoning deviant leisure perspective in criminology. It first problematises and challenges some of the central tenets of leisure as it has been approached by liberal social scientists; before going on to draw upon ultra-realist criminology theory to invite new perspectives and leisure and harm in contemporary consumer capitalism.
Deviant Leisure: A Critical Criminological Perspective for the 21st Century
Critical Criminology, 2019
This article argues that the time has arrived for leisure and consumerism to become key objects of study for a 21st century critical criminology. As global capitalism struggles to sustain itself it is creating myriad crises in areas such as employment, personal debt, mental health issues and climate change. Using a zemiological lens, we argue that it is on the field of commodified leisure and consumerism that criminologists can see these meta-crises of liberal capitalism unfold. Therefore, this article positions the burgeoning deviant leisure perspective as a new and distinct form of 21st century critical criminology that departs from traditional criminological approaches to leisure rooted in the sociology of deviance in favour of critical criminology’s recent zemiological turn to social harm. In doing so, this article outlines how the deviant leisure perspective’s emergence at the intersection of zemiology, green criminology and ultra-realist criminological theory enables it to address some of the realities of our times, and begin to explain the normalised harms that emanate from the relationship between commodified leisure and consumer capitalism.
Introduction: Deviant Leisure and Events of Deviance
Unproofed draft introduction to "Deviant Leisure and events of Deviance: A Transgressive Compendium"", 2022
In this chapter we set out the conceptual landscape of the book. We explore the place studies of deviant leisure has had within the wider field of leisure studies and its somewhat lesser presence within event studies. Our central argument is that in both fields it has been treated in a way that has given it neither the space nor inclination to delve into the theme in a way that respects the integrity and hard work of its practitioners and event planners. If one pursues the lines of flight that emerge from such an approach one embarks on a deviant journey within critical perspectives in both leisure and event studies; the result is a book that transgresses the frame of a standard academic edited collection to become more of a compendium of deviant leisure, event, and practice. [Book due for publication by Palgrave Macmillan late 2022 - early 2023: ISBN-13 : 978-3031177927]
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
Terror, Leisure and Consumption: Spaces for Harm in a Post-Crash Era
2018
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
Leisure/Loisir, 2021
Recent calls for papers in numerous academic journals within leisure studies have focused on a global and nation-specific climate that leans towards autocratic policy development, fascist rhetoric as the norm, and a greater expansion of a neoliberal philosophy. A critical leisure approach critiques leisure studies and leisure research for what the construction of leisure is in its origin and in its function. The aim of this discussion is to present counter, critical narratives to leisure studies. Two hundred and ninety-two texts that focused on the ‘critical’ in leisure were read and analyzed through critical discourse analysis and political discourse analysis. The analysis resulted in a historiography that articulates four key alternative or counter traditions: Critical Leisure Studies; New Leisure; Post-Leisure Studies; and Anti-Leisure, which could aid leisure studies into taking on a role as a ‘new’ cultural studies.