(Re)Theorizing Leisure, Experience and Race (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Comparative Analysis of Race and Mattering in Leisure Literature
International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure, 2021
The purpose of this thesis was to examine the progression of discourse on race within leisure studies scholarship through the lens of racecraft and the construct of mattering. The Journal of Leisure Research as well as Schole were examined within the periods of the 1990s (1989-2000) and the 2010s (2009-2019). Articles were chosen based upon their employment of the keywords of community recreation, youth development, and race within both time periods, yielding a total of 99 articles that were examined. A discourse historical approach (DHA) was utilized in assessment of the impact of the socio-political context on leisure research as well as the development of discourse on race. Through DHA techniques and the concept of racecraft, this project classified articles under five overarching themes: Faint mentions of race, racialization in the negative, improper terminology use, intentionality of race, and inadequate lens of problem/solution. Based upon the findings of this thesis, leisure literature has displayed minimal progression in its conceptualizations of race. Leisure studies scholarship reflects the dominant discourse through its latent ideology of racism that maintains marginalization of various racialized ethnic groups. It is posited that, without institutional examination and targeted mitigation efforts, the field of leisure will continue to uphold a detrimental racial order with an underdeveloped political and historical stance on race.
2009
This special issue of the Journal of Leisure Research focuses on critical race theory and social justice perspectives on whiteness, difference(s) and (anti)racism in leisure studies. Drawing on Floyd's (2007) previous work articulating waves of race research in leisure studies, we argue this special issue helps to advance a fourth wave. As part of this fourth wave, papers in this issue address the limitations of essentializing race, advance arguments around the social construction and deconstruction of racial categories, re-examine race and racism within broader theoretical frameworks, and connect power, ideology and white hegemony, to illustrate how whiteness is perpetuated and internalized. In this wave, race is also understood as performance. Authors examine the racialization of space and call for a rethinking of justice to address racism and ideologies inherent within policies and practices. This fourth wave also invokes a call for the use of more diverse methodological app...
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.
International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure, 2022
The fourth wave of leisure studies challenges researchers to investigate the social construction of race through leisure, in contrast to understanding race as a variable. Floyd (2007) challenged us to think about the future challenges and trends around race and ethnicity in leisure studies. Though significant progress has been made since the 1970s, we still have far to go in assessment of race and ethnicity in leisure. The objective of this manuscript is to answer the call made by Floyd for an anticipated fourth wave task of "understand[ing] how leisure practices create, reinforce, and perpetuate racist practices in contemporary America" (2007, 249). We apply a theoretical framework that centers racism and whiteness, drawn from race scholarship across fields: the sociology of race, Critical Race Theory (CRT), whiteness studies, settler colonialism studies, and Black and Native Studies. We apply this framework to investigate the storytelling at two National Park Service (NPS) monuments which we provide as case studies to analyze how spatialized historical storytelling consolidates structural white supremacy in the parks, despite a rhetoric of inclusivity. Only once we understand how racism and white supremacy are embedded in NPS narratives can we begin to make changes to reduce white supremacist storytelling in leisure practice.
Dialogues on Whiteness, Leisure and (Anti)Racism
Journal of Leisure Research, 2009
This essay offers one response to recent calls for leisure studies scholars to more effectively integrate race into their analyses. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship within ethnic studies, cultural studies, and gender/women's studies the article initiates a broader dialogue about the possibilities and dangers of analyzing whiteness within leisure contexts. The article outlines several studies that demonstrate ways in which whiteness operates to advantage white hegemony. It suggests how the concepts of power evasiveness, normalization and intersectionality might be applied to leisure settings and concludes with a discussion of some problems associated with the study of whiteness. The ultimate aim of the essay is to provoke further dialogue as a step toward documenting and overturning inequitable social arrangements in the movement toward justice.
Notes From A Leisure Son: Expanding An Understanding of Whiteness in Leisure
Journal of Leisure Research, 2009
Whiteness is a fundamental aspect of American society and because of this leisure research is as troubled as our own racialized identities. Whiteness becomes a problematic dimension in our discourse if unchallenged by not critically examining race within the context of power. Taking a stance that Whiteness exists in five politically based racial projects, enables leisure research to uncover the apparent and invisible ways that power exists in professional practices, public policy development, and accepted research paradigms in published works. Inspired by Notes From a Native Son and serving as a rejoinder to previous discussions on Whiteness and race, the aim here is to address Whiteness in leisure with a brief analysis of history, contemporary issues, and policy. With an expanded understanding of Whiteness, leisure research could be a liberating tool for social justice to usher new conceptions, new theories, and new approaches to instruction, programming, and understanding in the field.
A People's History of Leisure Studies: Leisure, the Tool of Racecraft
Leisure Sciences, 2019
The pernicious existence of race serves as the underlying force in modern societies. As such, the aim of this discussion is to postulate that leisure is a tool of racecraft: 1) the articulation of power, 2) the erection of places of demarcation, and 3) reification of the racial order. What is presented here is in one part a re-examination of seminal texts on Race in leisure studies and another part a case study of the 1919 Chicago race riots and the Biloxi wade-ins from 1959 to 1963. Both of these historical cases illustrate the simple act of recreational swimming in legally or socially segregated waters and pools outraged the White social order in the United States. This history is mirrored in the present day, not as another isolated horrible aside that arises from time-to-time in leisure but rather as the seemingly perpetual role of leisure to maintain the proper racial order, racecraft.
Social Justice as an Integrating Force for Leisure Research
Leisure Sciences, 2014
As enthusiasm for social justice inquiry in leisure studies builds, this essay identifies three concerns related to the practice of social justice research involving race and ethnicity in leisure. First, social justice research must rely on diverse paradigms to respond to urgent social problems facing communities of color. Second, researchers must acknowledge the moral dimension in social justice inquiry. Third, power differentials between researchers and communities of practice and the community members involved in studies should be recognized and minimized when possible.
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
Leisure, identities and personal growth
Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure: Meanings, Motives and Lifelong Learning, 2013
""Leisure studies have a long history of associating leisure practices and the meanings of leisure with notions of personal growth and self-development. This association is bound up with questions of personal identity and relies on the possibility that we have a stable personal self that we can develop. The prospect of a stable personal self is a distinguishing feature of modernity, and there is now substantial literature from a postmodern perspective suggesting that identities are instead fragmented and transitory. This raises a fundamental tension. If identities are transitory, how can we develop them? And what are the repercussions of this for personal growth through leisure practices? These questions have important implications for the meanings of leisure. In this chapter I attempt to unpack some of these issues. I begin by discussing personal identities in the context of modernity, drawing out how the challenge of developing a coherent sense of personal identity became a defining feature of the late modern period in the Western world. The discussion leads us to how leisure is implicated in modern developmental approaches to self, particularly through concepts such as ‘serious leisure’ (Stebbins 1982) and ‘flow experience’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990). My focus then turns to a divergent postmodern perspective that argues that there is no core self and we instead exist in a world characterized by increasingly fragmented identities. A postmodern perspective argues that the concept of a stable personal identity that we might develop has been a historical social construction. Such a view has little time for notions of personal growth through leisure. I then turn to how the social sciences have begun to see a middle ground between postmodern ‘discourse determinism’ (Wearing & Wearing 2001) on the one hand and an essentialized notion of self on the other. Such a view allows for a re-examination of how we might attempt building a reflective sense of personal identity out of embodied everyday practice. The chapter concludes by reflecting on how positive experiences of leisure, rather than necessarily being viewed as disparate or episodic, may instead constitute a lifestyle in which the accumulation of personally enriching leisure practices engenders perceptions of self-development and growth. It is through this perspective that there may be some reconciliation of modern and postmodern stances on personal identity and scope for assigning value to the importance of subjective lived experience.""