LEISURE, ACTIVISM, AND THE ANIMATION OF THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT Introduction to the Book (original) (raw)
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
Communication Quarterly, 2014
This article discusses the relationship between leisure and human communication and suggests that more attention is needed to study how leisure shapes human communication.
2018
319-70974-1 "[...] so it becomes necessary to show him [Émile] what man really is. Society must be studied through men and men through society. Men must not be shown through their masks, but must be painted just as they are, to the end that the young may not hate them, but pity them and avoid resembling them. Let him know that man is naturally good, but that society depraves him; let him be induced to esteem the individual, but to despise the masses; let him see that nearly all men wear the same mask, but let him also know that there are faces more beautiful than the mask covers them".-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile: Or, Treatise on Education (1762). p. 346 This magnificent edited textbook highlights the outstanding papers presented at the Research Committee Thirteen (Sociology of Leisure, RC 13) sessions at the International Sociological Association's Third Forum of Sociology which took place in Vienna in 2016. The aim of this academic work is to demonstrate the relevant nature of the discipline of leisure studies and the entire maturity of its theories in local, virtual and global environment (Beniwal et al. 2018). Most of the authors are aware of the philosophical approach and are situated somewhere within this parameter that is to say "[d]rawing on Habermasian theory of communicative action, Spracklen (2009) argues that leisure has the potential to promote democratic, horizontal exchange based on communicative rationality rather than instrumental rationality" (Tanaka and Ishida 2018, p. 214). In that regard, the struggle for a better world in a global era is always influenced by small actions in order to achieve harmony in daily life and certainly calls for the practice of tolerance and for the sharing of values between individuals who are personcentered.
Palpable Cities: leisure in the contemporary urban geographies – a theoritecal discussion
2020
Right to the city Urban geography Human geography Neoliberal capitalism This paper argues the role of cities as scenarios where the economic, social, political, cultural, leisure, educational and also geographical inequality it is increasingly evident. It is intended to reflect about the close relationship of humans with the territory. In addition, we seek to discuss the importance of leisure as a builder of identity (individual and social), of belonging and a key factor in appropriations (through the leisure experiences, the routes and places that each individual has in their city) of the territory by its inhabitants.
Appropriating the spectacle: play and politics in a leisure landscape
Journal of Urban Design, 2004
The urban riverfront of Melbourne, Australia, has been transformed over the past 20 years into a popular leisure precinct known as Southbank. This is a postmodern landscape of contrived spectacle, where playful urban life is simulated, choreographed and consumed. Yet it is also the site of many forms of unplanned and unstructured activity. This paper explores the complex uses and meanings which can develop around such a waterfront, and outlines three dialectics which reveal how many new kinds of public life emerge within it. New tensions between global and local, politics and play, representation and embodied action lead to a rethinking of both formularized waterfronts and urban design theories.
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.
Leisure as an object of governance.docx
Leisure/Loisir, 2019
[First version - revisions submitted and accepted: Due for publication towards the end of 2019] Leisure as an object of governance in UK election manifestos, 1945 to 1983 For most working people, the decade following the Second World War saw a substantial change in the amount of leisure time they had available and in how that time could be accessed. Prior to the cessation of hostilities periods of extended leave had been few and, for the majority, determined by employers, who would stipulate when the small amount of holiday time available could be taken. The dominant model was that of factory closure, in whole or part, and large groups of workers taking their annual leave together, on works trips that were frequently organised by their employers. During the 1950s the amount of paid leave that could be taken had risen substantially. There was greater freedom to both select when leave could be taken and for that selection to be on an individual basis. That, coupled with a relative increase in basic disposable income for many working people, average earning increased by around 40% between 1950 and 1965, resulted in a growing demand for leisure resources. It is in this period that we also find the political parties vying for power at general elections begin to address leisure as a legitimate area of governmental policy. Using a lexical frequency analysis to locate instances where leisure and recreation are discussed, in combination with historical contextualisation of the imaginary of leisure articulated in the text, this paper will consider how leisure was construed as an object of governance in election manifestos by the Conservative and Labour) parties between 1945 and 1983. The period between 1951 and 1964 saw a growth in interest, from both parties, in addressing leisure and recreation as an object of governmental policy; however, since then, its place on the political agenda has been more turbulent and partisan. From 1974 to 1983 it was the Labour party that maintained an interest in developing leisure policy as part of its electoral agenda, whilst moving away from an orientation that required substantial governmental intervention. In conclusion, this paper will reflect on the additional insights into the imaginary of leisure as an object of governmental policy afforded by the lexical analysis of text. Keywords: Leisure Policy; Elections; Manifestos; Lexical analysis; the Imaginary of leisure. [NB: I will be uploading the tables etc. in the teaching documents folder]