Karen M. Fox

Rec Needs a New Rhythm Cuz Rap Is Where We're Livin'

This research presents an autoethnographic strategy for self-reflection by sharing stories consistent with Indigenous methodologies and establishing a frame for re-mixing leisure theory. As an autoethnographic study, we reflect on how we have been engaged, changed, and challenged to rethink understandings of leisure and ourselves as leisure scholar-practitioners as a result of listening to rap music, especially composed by Aboriginal young people. We pause on questions related to how Aboriginal young people challenge leisure theory and its relevance to their lives through their rap and hip hop performances.

Rethinking Experience: What Do We Mean by This Word “Experience”?:

This paper uses autoethnography to reassess the concept “experience” and the lack of theoretical frameworks within experiential education for delimiting experience within the practices and research around experiential, adventure, and outdoor education. Although a pivotal and essential part of practice, theoretical understandings of experience have been missing in experiential education scholarship. Experience is clearly a complex, constructed “reality.” Jagger (cited in Lauritzen, 1997, p. 83) has pointed out that an appeal to experience is “fraught with methodological difficulties.” What exactly is experience? Whose experience is heard? Like other disciplines, for example the studies of religions and psychology, experiential education has no rigorous definitions, characterizations, typologies, or conceptualizations of the focus of its study and practice—a type of experience. Drawing upon critiques from Indigenous, feminist, postcolonial, and black Americans and Canadians, and integrating with an autoethnographic approach, this paper provides a critique of the existing use of “experience” and sketches an initial approach for developing theoretical understandings of the central phenomenon of experiential, adventure, and outdoor education.

Listening for a Leisure Remix

The traditional historical meta-narratives around leisure have focused on one Greek concept, ΣXOΛH, translated as schole and connected to the Latin (licentia) and English words. Direct lines were drawn from an interpretation of this Greek word in particular contexts to the current privileged leisure ideal first in Europe and the United Kingdom and then in North America. The complex history of the ancient Mediterranean world and the continuing histories of “leisures” in Europe and the United Kingdom not to mention other parts of the world were left invisible. As a performance of scholarship in leisure, we use a jazz, rap, and hip hop musical metaphorical strategy and draw upon scholarship from other disciplines to sound out the partiality of the historical meta-narrative of leisure and its resultant effects within current leisure scholarship and practices. Furthermore, we add historiographically to a redescription of the histories of leisure and imaginatively contribute to remixes of theories about leisures.

Aboriginal peoples in North American and euro‐north American leisure

Abstract The intersection of Euro‐North American leisure and recreation with the cultures and practices of Aboriginal peoples in North America has received scant attention in academic literature about leisure. Given the importance of leisure in the modern world, the numerous declarations and propositions that leisure is important to the health and well‐being of Aboriginal peoples in North America, the political interconnections of parks, natural resources and Aboriginal sovereignty and land rights, and the potential for commodification, appropriation, and reproduction of colonialistic and imperialistic forces within Euro‐North American leisure, this oversight is troublesome. In the following discussion, I extend, develop, and add to earlier calls for more research, scholarship, and reflection about the intersection of Aboriginal peoples and Euro‐North American leisure. In addition, I explore issues identified by Indigenous peoples and scholars as relevant to the intersection and research about, by, for, and with Aboriginal peoples.

Leisure as part of cultural retention of Finnish‐Canadian immigrants

Abstract Leisure, sports, and recreation activities can be a means of facilitating well‐being and coherence in the lives of immigrants. The purpose of the research is to learn how leisure and sport behaviours were integrated into Finnish immigrants’ lives and affected by their immigration experiences. Framed using an ecosystem theoretical approach, a life history method is used to elicit participants’ leisure and sport experiences in Manitoba. Respondents showed leisure practices that were shaped by previous activities in Finland and by work experiences. Further, respondents sought to recreate Finland in Manitoba by building and using a sauna and a summer cottage, as well as celebrating Finnish holidays and birthday events. They also visited Finland to keep current with changes there and to visit relatives. Participation in Finnish cultural organizations was another way to continue a Finnish past in Canada.

Reconsidering the relationship between flow and feminist ethics: a response

Although we agree with the direction of Masons (1999) analysis, we struggle with the rationale in support of the linkage between leisure, flow, and feminist ethics. First, the interconnection of flow theory and feminist ethics is highly problematic, because flow does not easily exemplify leisure and is often based on theories many feminists critique. Second, the description of feminism as a homogeneous whole without regard to the paradoxical and contradictory nature of many feminisms leaves invisible important critiques and dissension that has substantial implications for leisure theory. Finally, the use of narrative ethics without addressing the fundamental challenges to how we know (ontology) and the construction of meta-theory limits how narrative ethics can enhance and challenge existing knowledge. This paper explores each of the concerns in relationship to the argument provided in Masons (1999) article connecting flow to philosophical theories of rights and utilitarianism, feminist ethics, and narrative ethics in an attempt to critique bodyshape industries.

Tending to the soil: autobiographical narrative inquiry of gardening.

This autobiographical narrative inquiry takes the reader alongside the lived experiences of one of the authors (Michael) with his family’s gardens and two community gardens in Edmonton (Heritage and Eco). By focusing on Michael’s story of gardening, the authors demonstrate the power of narrative inquiry (Clandinin, J., & Connelly, M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass) as an approach that tends to the descriptive and paradoxical dynamics of leisure practice by providing multiple narratives to dominant conceptualizations of gardening. The institutional, community and personal narratives of gardening that wove in and through Michael’s experiences of gardening are used to show how leisures are polythetic constructions situated in contexts with people, cultures and communities (Fox, K., & Klaiber, E. (2006). Listening for a leisure remix. Leisure Sciences, 28(5), 411–430). As the narratives in this article illustrate, gardeners continually negotiate multiple landscapes and stories of gardening. Adding the rich and multivariate experiences of gardeners amongst the meta-narratives of gardening is to enrich, complicate and highlight the diversity of lives lived.

Working to honour difference.

Abstract Recreation scholars and practitioners are among the professionals learning to navigate through a multicultural, diverse, and paradoxical world. We wish to suggest that it is necessary for recreation professionals to attend to cultural contexts (a) for the benefits of recreation to be realized across cultural boundaries, and (b) to assist in sorting through the need, often expressed by various cultural groups, to maintain or promote cultural heritage, traditions, and history, while continuing to develop, change, and advance. Adapting Brookfields (1995) critical self-reflective model, we critique our participation in a cross-cultural research project involving Aboriginal and First Nations peoples. The ideas presented point to the need for all recreation professionals to engage in both private and public self-reflective and critical practices.

Intersecting Rhythms: The Spatial Production of Local Canadian Heavy Metal and Urban Aboriginal Hip Hop in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Hip hop and heavy metal are two music cultures that resonate with young people worldwide (Higgins, 2009; Hill and Spracklen, 2010). The complex and paradoxical flows of globalized and technological music have sustained and inspired local communities while exposing them to social, economic, and competitive pressures. The focus on globalizing flows and local-global intersections often leaves invisible the specific and material everyday lives of local artists and fans. Theorists who examine the rise of the city or urban theory often focus on the opportunities, the openness, and the encounters with difference (Merrifield, 2013), and glide past the friction of the worldly encounter (Tsing, 2005) that is filled with desires for the fruits of globalization which overlooks how existing everyday life practices are (re)shaped by globalization.

Does the gospel of Luke suggest a Christian‐Judaic form of leisure in the Graeco‐Roman world?

Abstract Traditionally in leisure studies, the “origin” of leisure begins with the Greek concept of schole. However, the Graeco‐Roman world was a vibrant, diverse, and commercial socio‐political world. The focus on only one Greek concept of leisure to the exclusion of competing Greek ideas and other cultures obscures the multiplicity and contested forms of leisure in the Graeco‐Roman world. The canonical gospels of the Christian‐Judaic heritage provided glimpses and rhetorical structures that situated the “historical” Jesus within a specific human world that challenged or modified leisure practices of that era. Blending scholarship from histories and theories of leisures (Fox & Klaiber, 2006), archaeological, anthropological, and historical understandings of the Graeco‐Roman world, and literary interpretations of the canonical gospels, I argue that the Gospel of Luke is an alternative format for a Christian‐Judaic leisure.