Erin Sharpe

Resources at the grassroots of recreation: organizational capacity and quality of experience in a community sport organization.

Grassroots recreation organizations are volunteer-run informal organizations that deliver sport and recreation at the local level. Using a qualitative case study approach, this study examined how the quality of experience in one community sport organization was affected by organizational capacity, or the ability of the organization to mobilize financial, human, and structural capital to fulfill its mission. While the volunteers mobilized social capital, the league experienced significant shortages of human capital including the professional competencies to meet increasingly complex administrative demands. This finding raises concerns about potential disenfranchisement of volunteers.

Festivals and Social Change: Intersections of Pleasure and Politics at a Community Music Festival

This paper considers how pleasure and politics intersect in the context of a community music festival. Described is Hillside Festival, a music festival with political aims. This paper focuses on how the leisure context of the event shaped the approach, style, and efficacy of the attempt to foster social change. Overall, the festival followed a prefigurative political approach, which allowed the leisure qualities of the event to flourish. While questions remain concerning the potential for social change within voluntarily chosen leisure events, the notion of “pleasure-politics” reveals new possibilities for both leisure and political action.

“It’s Not Fun Any More:” A Case Study of Organizing a Contemporary Grassroots Recreation Association

Abstract As local, informally run, volunteer groups, grassroots associations have been noted for their role in generating social capital, citizenship, and civic engagement. However, while the benefits of such associations have been theorized, there is a lack of empirical studies that investigate the contemporary context of grassroots associations. Presented here is a descriptive case study of a local softball league in Southern Ontario. What the case shows is an organization that faced significant challenges in maintaining its informality within a social environment that favours formality. The consequence for the league members was an increasing sense of dissatisfaction and frustration stemming from their interaction with local institutions, lack of specialized knowledge, and declining support from association members. In sum, it appeared that this contemporary grassroots association faces a dilemma: while formalization may ameliorate the league failures, it also decreases the potential for social benefits related to social capital and civic engagement.

Sustaining environmental pedagogy in times of educational conservatism: a case study of integrated curriculum programs

Although the global call for environmental education is persistent, on a local or regional level, this call can be confronted by educational policies that drive environmental education out of the curriculum. This paper reports on a qualitative case study of the factors contributing to the sustainability of three teacher‐driven integrated curriculum programs (ICPs). Four key factors were identified: financial self‐sufficiency and physical isolation (program separation); and visibility of teachers in the school and support from a broad network of allies (political connection). This paper suggests that ICPs can be further supported by fostering pedagogical kinships and expanding counter‐praxis discourse. The paper also highlights the importance of ‘ground‐up’ programs in sustaining environmental education in periods of educational conservatism.

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.

Leisure, space and change: Examining the terrain of social struggle and transformation

Over the past decade, cultural studies and critical theory have provided important contributions to our understanding of the concept of space (Aitchison, 1999; Crouch, 2006). In the call for papers for this special issue, we hoped to expand this pioneering scholarship, as we relied on Lefebvre’s (1991) deeply influential work on the production of space to proffer a notion of space not as a mere “thing in itself,” but as the outcome of complex and negotiated relationships. We conceptualized space as both a medium and an outcome of social relations that shape one’s identity development, and construct differences that take material form (van Ingen, 2003). Similar to van Ingen, we believed that “space needs to be examined as a point of ideological struggle and as the site for the re/production of power,” and within that examination, we sought to understand how “social space connects the wider structures of power to the lived experience of individual and collective actors” (p. 210). Space could be seen as oppressive and as a site of marginalization, and more significantly, it could also provide important counterspaces for “diverse, resistant, and oppositional practices” (van Ingen, 2003, p. 204). Drawing on this framework, it was our hope the call for papers would encourage new ways of understanding leisure and its relationship to space and change, and through a critical scholarship, help us to consider the dominant ideologies and power structures as they are (re)produced, expressed and resisted. The first collection of papers of this special issue (see Leisure/Loisir, volume 35, issue 1, 2011) challenged us to rethink and re-imagine how we conceptualize the interrelationships between leisure, space and social change. Using new spatial metaphors and drawing from multiple disciplines, the authors re-conceptualized how we might seek to understand the complexity of leisure spaces. Concepts such as a moral terrain (Grimwood), agrileisure (Amsden and McEntee), thinking intersectionally (Watson and Ratna), the power of an individual to evoke positive social change (Dustin and Bricker) and the communitizing potential of institutional spaces (Fortune and Whyte) were put forth.

Targeted neighbourhood social policy: a critical analysis

Targeted neighbourhood social policies are policies that target specific neighbourhoods of ‘deprivation’ for additional investment and support. As a community policy framework, they are both popular and controversial. This paper considers the targeted neighbourhood policy strategy in terms of its roots, rationale, assumptions, and concerns. Specifically, the paper investigates the notion of ‘neighbourhood effects’, the concern of neighbourhood stigma, and the link between targeted neighbourhood policy and neighbourhood pathologization. The paper concludes by considering the reasons why targeted neighbourhood policy continues to be enacted in the face of these ongoing concerns. This analysis is relevant to recreationists and healthy community advocates because of the range of ways that place-based approaches intersect with recreation and community health.

Leisure, space and change: foregrounding space in critical leisure scholarship

This double issue began modestly. In May 2009, the Ontario Research Council on Leisure (ORCOL) hosted a two-day conference at the University of Ottawa. As co-chairs of the conference, Erin and Heather sent out a call for articles exploring the relationship between space and social change in the leisure context. At the time, we were hoping to welcome new spatial language and to bring innovative conceptual frameworks to the study of leisure. Although our field has not been left out of the place/space debate (see, e.g. Smale, 2006), we felt that more attention was warranted and that we might add to the polyphony of “leisures” (Fox & Klaiber, 2006) by deliberately advocating a spatial lens. We also asked for articles that brought notions of transformation and social change to bear in this context and we viewed change broadly, so as to include changes related to personal self-discovery and growth, as well as relationships to community and social change. Although the gathering was small, the discussions were incredibly exciting. We decided to continue the debates and broadened the scope as we worked with Dawn to develop a call for abstracts and then for a special issue of Leisure/Loisir. We hoped that by inviting such explorations, we would be encouraging new ways of understanding leisure and its relationship to, among other things, power and change. Thus, our little conference blossomed and we are pleased to present a double issue containing what we think is some of the most interesting and provocative work in our field. The topic for the special issue brings three words together: leisure, space and change. Each word has its own significance and can certainly be examined that way. However, it was the excitement of seeing how they might emerge in relationship that became the driving force for the special issue. We intentionally kept the call broad and open to interpretation, as we were more interested in seeing the ways scholars would bring these ideas together than we were about shaping or defining the results. We were curious to know: Where would scholars place leisure in relation to space and social change? How would “the spatial” be taken up by authors who already have a change-oriented approach? And holistically, what would be the collective result of a set of articles in which all authors, in their own way, bring these ideas together? Our underlying hope for this endeavour was that it would bring

The Palgrave Handbook of Leisure Theory

This is the first handbook devoted entirely to leisure theory, charting the history and philosophy of leisure, theories in religion and culture, and rational theories of leisure in the Western philosophical tradition, as well as a range of socio-cultural theories from thinkers such as Adorno, Bauman, Weber and Marx. Drawing on contributions from experts in leisure studies from around the world, the four sections cover: traditional theories of leisure; rational theories of leisure; structural theories of leisure; and post-structural theories of leisure. The Palgrave Handbook of Leisure Theory is essential reading for students and scholars working in leisure studies, social theory as well as those working on the problem of leisure in the wider humanities and social sciences.

Against Limits: A Post-structural Theorizing of Resistance in Leisure

In its recognition of oppositional behavior as informed and political, resistance offers us a way to explore the interconnections between leisure and politics in meaningful ways. However, for the concept to have utility for theorizing theses interconnections, it needs to be located within broader theorizations of power. Drawing on the work of Foucault, this chapter offers a post-structural theorizing of power and resistance. In contrast to modernist binary conceptualizations of power and resistance, Foucault conceptualized power as circulating through a culture or a system and exercised at innumerable points and times. To Foucault, resistance was power exercised in the attempt to destabilize the limits of the present order. The chapter applies Foucault’s perspective of resistance as “against limits” to leisure, and argues that we can think of leisure as resistance when it expands the possibilities for what we can do and who we might imagine ourselves to be.