Brett Lashua

Sound and the Everyday in Qualitative Research

In this article, a constitutive aspect of the everyday world is attended to, which is too often absent or suppressed in social scientific accounts of social life: noise. A question is raised as to how social science has addressed the question of noise, through a reconsideration of sound and the everyday. Conventional “good practice” for the organization and conduct of research interviews is compared with alternative approaches more open to the space of everyday sounds, and the practice of soundwalking—the mobile exploration of (local) space and sounds—is offered as a productive context for the creative disturbance of the conventional interview. In closing, some of the possibilities of noise as these have been brought home to us in our own research with young people in noisy, everyday settings are set out.

Steps and stages: rethinking transitions in youth and place

This article is concerned with the interplay of young peoples biographies and transforming landscapes in south-east Wales. In particular the article focuses on a South Wales Valleys town, Ebbw Vale, to explore how changes to a place can be understood in relation to, and alongside youth transitions. The article reports on the ways in which narratives of the transformation, redevelopment and regeneration of place sit alongside the biographical transformations of young people themselves, as they make their transitions into adulthood. The article draws on concepts borrowed from geography, anthropology and architecture to advance a sociological argument for the consideration of continuity and everyday registers of meaning as a way of understanding change – both to place and in young peoples lives. The focus on a place which has undergone significant material, economic and landscape change enables the argument to be developed in relation to the transformation of communities and post-industrial economies. The article thus explores some of the connectivities between young people, locality, and (both imagined and real) biographical and material changes.

Rhythms in the concrete: re-imagining relationships between space, race, and mediated urban youth cultures.

Abstract In this paper we describe a spatial approach toward leisure inquiry to report in part on a three‐year, arts‐based ethnographic study conducted through an urban recreation music program called The Beat of Boyle Street. Adopting the French philosopher/sociologist Henri Lefebvres concepts of “rhythmanalysis” (2004) and the social “production of space” (1991), we question how young people produce and represent everyday urban spaces through leisure (e.g., hip‐hop musical practices), and explore how spatial inquiry informs ideas about leisure, youth popular cultures, and power relations. This focus emphasizes the politics of popular leisure as spatial practices; popular practices which produce social space. This paper broadens a number of under‐theorized and under‐explored aspects of leisure research, primarily in terms of social space, and additionally in terms of popular culture, racialized bodies and identities, and boundaries of difference.

Introduction to the special issue: Music and Tourism

Music, in various styles and permutations – instrumental and vocal, solo or group, amplified or acoustic, formats – live and recorded, performances and venues, is a near universal and ubiquitous cultural expression. Musical genres are a product of human culture, something cherished for their aesthetic value, and yet also something that is the site of contestations of meaning and purpose across history, social and geographical spaces. In many ‘pre-modern’ cultures, music is bound tightly with rituality and sociality, the performance of belonging and power. In modernity, music has become part of the everyday spaces of leisure, a source of artistic expression and audience pleasure – but also a cultural product that is capable of being sanitised and commodified. Music articulates identities, rebellion, conformity, performance, status, product, community, subculture, high culture, distinction, place, space and more. In the construction of distinctive spaces, styles and genres, music reproduces the inequalities and struggles of the late modern world. The social and artistic status of musical genres, composers and performers ranges from the historical, canonical and ‘great’ such as Beethoven and the Beatles to contemporary forms that may be deemed by some to be tasteless ‘muzak’, subversive and socially divisive, for example, punk and ‘death metal’ from which we need to be

Pop-up cinema and place-shaping: urban cultural heritage at Marshall's Mill

‘Pop-up’ cinema is a phenomenon in which films are screened publicly at ad hoc venues, often outdoors – e.g. car parks, brownfield sites, beneath roadway flyovers, parks or pedestrianised spaces – screenings can ‘pop up’ literally anywhere. Through the case of a pop-up cinema in May 2012 at Marshalls Mill, a protected heritage site in Leeds (UK), the paper questions the relations between cities, communities and overlooked or marginal landscapes. This paper contextualises this pop-up cinema event within debates about urban cultural regeneration and shifting frameworks for cultural heritage. It specifically explores the construction of heritage communities within the Council of Europe [2005, October 27. Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society. Faro. Retrieved August 22, 2012, from http://conventions.coe.int/treaty/en/treaties/html/199.htm]. Within this policy framework, it is suggested that active, participatory, creative uses and processes can redefine cultural heritage and reshape urban places. Pop-up events, such as cinema but also including a range of arts, leisure and cultural activities, can help to envision opportunities and enact possibilities of reimagining and promoting different kinds of urban spaces, especially in contract to emphases during the recent neoliberal regeneration of many UK city centres, during what are now more challenging economic times.

Introduction to the special issue: Tuning in to popular leisure

Abstract This paper, as indeed the entire special issue, starts from the commonplace proposition that leisure and popular culture go hand in hand. On one hand, popular leisure practices are so much around us that it is easy to take them for granted. On the other hand, these very same practices provide key conduits to social and cultural power, individual agency, identity, and creativity. Yet, in sharp contrast to the “fantastic” leisure that figures in most leisure research, popular leisure currently receives little attention within leisure studies. This paper introduces the special issue by providing an overview of key terms, concepts, and questions related to studying popular leisure. Far from trivial, attending to the politics of popular leisure tunes in to the significance of such routine activities, mundane practices, mass entertainments, folk movements, and everyday goings‐on, which, for all their seeming triviality, overflow with meaning and significance that extends far beyond pleasure and enjoyment.

Getting It on Record: Issues and Strategies for Ethnographic Practice in Recording Studios

The recording studio has been somewhat neglected as a site for ethnographic fieldwork in the field of ethno-musicology and, moreover, the majority of published studies tend to overlook the specific concerns faced by the researcher within these contexts. Music recording studios can be places of creativity, artistry, and collaboration, but they often also involve challenging, intimidating, and fractious relations. Given that recording studios are, first and foremost, concerned with documenting musicians’ performances, we discuss the concerns of getting studio interactions “on record” in terms of access, social relations, and methods of data collection. This article reflects on some of the issues we faced when conducting our fieldwork within British music recording facilities and makes suggestions based on strategies that we employed to address these issues.

Liverpool Musicscapes: Music Performance, Movement and the Built Urban Environment

Music has been closely related to movement. Popular musicianship, for example, is commonly spoken and written about using metaphors of mobility: musicians go out on the road, on tour, or gig in the club circuit (Laing, 2008) and most, like the musician noted above, come back. The language of popular music is suffused with movement. For example, the musical and stylistic development of the Liverpool post-punk band Echo & the Bunnymen was described by Reynolds (2005: 439) as a voyage: If Goth took one route from post-punk back to loud-and-proud rock, Echo & the Bunnymen followed another path: not descent into darkness but soaring into the light. The celestial drive of their crystal guitars and the seeking beseeching vocals conjured a sense of quest for a vague grail or glory. The Bunnymen pioneered a style of purified eighties rock.

‘Crossing the line’: addressing youth leisure, violence and socio‐geographic exclusion through documentary film‐making

This paper explores a documentary film‐making approach to leisure scholarship and practice. Two films – Crossing the Line (2007) and Crossing the Line: Northern Exposure (2008) produced by young people to address issues of violence and the politics of place – provide the specific focus of the paper. These films illustrate youth perspectives of neighbourhoods; both documentaries share the processes of their production, and both aim to spur discussion about overlooked socio‐geographical boundaries that lead to youth exclusion and violence. In the Crossing the Line films, the style of interactive, reflexive documentary film‐making presents opportunities to create dialogue, introduce young people to creative and expressive projects and new skills, and empower young people to speak out about the local issues that affect their lives and leisure. By framing some theories of documentary film‐making, the paper suggests that leisure scholarship also ‘cross the line’ to engage with broader concerns and participatory approaches.

What difference does dance make? Critical conversations across dance, physical activity and public health

ABSTRACT Critical conversations concerning if and how dance ‘fits’ within current (dominant) discourse across physical activity (PA), public health (PH) and sport policy are presented here in the form of commentaries from a ‘collective’ research base and individual ‘worldviews’ that includes the director of an established community-based dance organisation, a local authority PH commissioner and three academic researchers (a sociologist, cultural geographer and technologist). Dynamic dialogue between all parties has been encouraged throughout the research process (January–December 2015). From our viewpoints, discursive differences and occasional disciplinary dilemmas are regarded as potentially knowledge producing. We share transcribed parts of our critical conversations to illustrate how evaluating dance as PA represents opportunities for challenging if not disrupting some discursive terrain, whilst concurrently being somewhat constrained by that terrain. Our broader research remit contributes to ongoing debates surrounding ‘what works’ in relation to PA. Our dynamic interactions are thus constitutive of and productive within wider circuits or discourses of policy and provision. Paradigmatic rivalry or epistemological ‘tensions’ may well be hindering attempts to demonstrate that dance does have positive impacts on health. Acknowledgement and engagement with these tensions can arguably inform policy and practice in effective and meaningful ways and contribute further to debates regarding an evidence base seeking to ‘prove’ the benefits of activity-based programmes and interventions as we look across PA, PH and sport.