LEISURE, ACTIVISM, AND THE ANIMATION OF THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT Introduction to the Book (original) (raw)
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Leisure Studies, 2021
This editorial sets the conceptual frame of reference for the special issue. It examines key themes at the intersection of activist leisure and critical event studies. Drawing on a wide range of social and leisure theory, we establish the critical lens of the Disrupt! project. Funded by Leeds Beckett University, Disrupt! used a variety of innovative methods to interrogate how activism could animate urban spaces.
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.
Political ecologies of leisure: a critical approach to nature-society relations in leisure studies
A considerable amount of leisure studies scholarship over the past half-century implicates 'nature' taking a prominent role in leisure studies scholarship. Most often in leisure-oriented literature, nature takes the form of an inert, unproblematic backdrop upon which human leisure experiences take place, in deference to the individual experience in nature. Political ecology is a critical approach that foregrounds nature-society relationships, noting the substantial role of political economy in influencing human behaviour, ecological conditions, and the dynamic interactions between the two. While political ecology scholarship regularly addresses leisure activities, settings, and perspectives, and leisure studies scholarship often considers nature-society interconnections, rarely has there been explicit connections between political ecology and leisure. In this paper, we state the case that in the Anthropocene, where nearly all ecological interactions are affected by human influences, it is appropriate for leisure studies scholars to more fully incorporate political ecology into research and praxis.
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
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.