Paul Gilchrist

Lifestyle sport, public policy and youth engagement: examining the emergence of parkour

In this article we consider the development of parkour in the South of England and its use in public policy debates and initiatives around youth, physical activity and risk. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with participants and those involved in the development of parkour in education, sport policy and community-based partnerships, we explore the potential of parkour to engage communities, particularly those traditionally excluded from mainstream sport and physical education provision. We discuss how the perceived success of parkour in these different contexts is related to the culture and ethos of the activity that is more inclusive, anticompetitive and less rule-bound than most traditional sports, and to its ability to provide managed risk-taking. More broadly, the article highlights the emergence of lifestyle sports as tools for policymakers and the potential role these nontraditional, non-institutionalized lifestyle sports can make in terms of encouraging youth engagement, physical health and well-being. Our article therefore contributes to ongoing debates about the (in)ability of traditional sports to meet government targets for sport and physical activity participation.

Spaces of transgression: governance, discipline and reworking the carnivalesque

In this essay we seek to engage with the emerging research agenda related to the analysis of deviant activities performed in times and spaces conventionally associated with leisure. Using a reading of Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal work on the governmental structures informing medieval festivals, we suggest that much leisure research has misunderstood the role of deviance in the performance of social relations. Rather than the superficial commodification arguments routinely advanced on behalf of Bakhtin, we argue that his work reveals a much deeper message about the hegemonic regulatory function performed by the licensing of deviant practices within such festivals. With reference to the contemporary example of the regulation of public sexual practices, we argue that the public legitimation (and relaxed policing) of private ‘deviance’ (performed in public places) is a cornerstone of the enduring governmental tactics used to licence illicit behaviours according to strict temporal and spatial boundaries. We conclude that Bakhtin’s work remains highly relevant to the deconstruction of contemporary social relations, but through the analysis of, for example, the ‘playful deviance’ of illicit sexual practice, rather than through simplistic comparisons of medieval and contemporary festivals.

Negotiating Recreational Access Under Asymmetrical Power Relations: The Case of Inland Waterways in England

This article addresses recreational conflict between anglers and boaters in England. While recognizing that interpersonal conflicts between individual anglers and boaters exist much as they do in other countries, the article argues that the position in England is mediated through complex land and property rights that position the stakeholders asymmetrically, as legal rights holders (anglers) and moral rights claimants (boaters). Under this scenario, negotiated attempts to increase access for boaters are interpreted not primarily as a means of addressing the asymmetry, but as a mechanism for underwriting the dominant property power of the anglers. Using data collected from focus groups involving stakeholders, the article suggests that in cases where recreational access to natural resources is mediated through sociopolitical institutions such as law, weaker stakeholders have very limited options in terms of the legal or social mechanisms through which he can pursue or assert their claims.

Space hijacking and the anarcho-politics of leisure

Political scientists, social movement theorists and cultural geographers have made us aware of forms of micro-political resistance that have challenged the privatisation, corporatisation and securitisation of the city. An increasing tactical feature of such resistance has been the deployment of leisure practices and performances to challenge the dominant norms and ideologies governing the use of urban space. This paper focuses upon a case study of a creative intervention organised by a London-based group of anarchists. We consider the tactics employed by the Space Hijackers – a group of self-styled ‘anarchitects’ who have been prominent in questioning the spatialities of everyday urban life through leisure activity and creative protest opportunities. We assess the deliberately liminal tactics employed by the Space Hijackers, situated betwixt and between the normative social regulation of public space and a ‘pre-figurative’ or utopian vision of its future. Through the case study and a review of some prominent attempts to define the leisure–politics relationship, this essay highlights a need to further interrogate the nature and uses of leisure within micro-political struggle and citizen movements that seek to affect social change, and so continues the dialogue about how we are to understand ‘leisure politics’.

‘Power to the paddlers’? The internet, governance and discipline

This article explores the role of the internet in the processes of organisation and mobilisation of a sporting subculture in asserting rights to enjoy the countryside for recreational purposes. It reports upon findings from a qualitative survey of chat room posts surrounding claims made by canoeists for better access to inland waterways in England and Wales. Informed by a reworking of the gift relationship, the findings question claims about the power of the internet to shape and realise democratic participation, indicating instead that it supports wider hegemonic relationships that constrain sporting activity and provides a mechanism for discipline within the subculture that is counter‐intuitive to a broader politics of access for recreational purposes.

Outdoor Recreation and the Environment

In the context of outdoor recreation and the environment, the ‘forbidden fruit’ has long been equality of access to all rural environments: landscapes have been there for the public to see (from a distance), to read about, and to be preserved, but (largely) not to be touched, far less used for anything as ephemeral as recreation and leisure. While leisure in capitalist Britain may have brought limited rewards for the ‘good citizen’ (Ravenscroft, 1993), there was never — certainly when The Devil Makes Work was written — a question of ‘unforbidding’ the fruits of rural property for the good of ordinary people (Shoard, 1987; Stephenson, 1989; Ravenscroft, 1996, 1998a; Parker and Ravenscroft, 1999, 2001). Indeed, the rhetoric of the day was largely that rural property required a level of ‘stewardship’ that made recre ational access and use inappropriate in all but the most robust locations (Ravenscroft, 1995). This was widely contrasted with the position elsewhere — especially ‘Europe’ — where, it was claimed, people could exercise ‘citizen rights’ of access over private land (see, in particular, Shoard, 1987). However, as Curry (2002) noted in his work on recreational access in New Zealand, intercountry comparisons are notoriously hard to make, even when the countries share similar legal foundations.

Co-designing non-hierarchical community arts research: the collaborative stories spiral

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential and durability of arts practice as research through developing a new approach to arts research that challenges the conventional association between dominant constructions of community and dominant modes of research. Design/methodology/approach – A co-design approach, situated in arts practice, has been used to generate a conceptual framework that offers potential to open up the workings of communities by examining them from the standpoint of those who have everyday experience of these communities. Findings – The paper argues that there can no longer be clearly demarcated boundaries between “academics” and “community partners” in a genuinely co-designed arts research process. Rather, there are “research partners” who share mutual recognition of skills and experiences that allow them to commit to a durable “new creative scholarship” that reflects their collective identities. Social implications – The conceptual framework celebrates the life sto...

The social benefits of informal and lifestyle sports: a research agenda

Understanding sport through the lens of social benefit has become a mainstay of sport policy analysis. A wealth of research has considered how sport contributes to achieving wider social benefits, ...

The spaces and times of community farming

This paper uses a multiple case study approach to researching people’s everyday lives and experiences of six community farms and gardens in diverse settings in China and England. We argue that collective understandings of community are bound up in everyday action in particular spaces and times. Successful community farms and gardens are those that are able to provide suitable spaces and times for these actions so that their members can enjoy multiple benefit streams. These benefits are largely universal: in very different situations in both England and China, CSA members make strong connections with the land, the farmers and other members, even in cases where they rarely visit the farms and gardens. This suggests that community farming and gardening initiatives possess multi-dimensional transformational potential. Not only do they offer a buffer against industrialised and remote food systems, but they also represent therapeutic landscapes valued by those who have experienced time spent at or in connection with them. Our findings indicate that—regardless of location or cultural context—these benefits are durable, so that people who have been engaged in multiple activities at a community farm or garden continue to enjoy these benefits long after most of their engagement has ceased.

Property Ownership, Resource Use, and the ‘Gift of Nature’

Through a theoretical and empirical consideration of gift exchange we argue in this paper that those with legal interests in land have constructed property relations around a claim of reciprocity with nature. This has been used to legitimate the ways in which they have deployed their property power to exclude others, thus seeking to retain their dominion over both humans and nonhumans. In so doing, however, people with such interests have failed to understand the dynamic of gift relationships, with their inherent inculcation of subject and other, to the point where the exercise of power becomes contingent on the continued hegemony of property relations. Using the politics of recreational access to inland waters in England and Wales, we show that power—over both humans and nonhumans—is temporary and conditional in ways that are not fully theorised in most contemporary debates about property rights and their deployment on nonhuman subjects.