Extreme Landscapes Of Leisure

In recent years, there has been an increased engagement throughout the social sciences with the study of extreme places and practices. Dangerous games and adventure tours have shifted from being marginal, exotic or mad to being more than merely acceptable. They are now exemplary, mainstream even: there are a variety of new types, increasing numbers of people are doing them and they are being appropriated and have infiltrated more and more contexts. This book argues that hazardous sports and adventure tourism have become rather paradoxical. As a set of activities where players and holidaymakers are closer to death or danger than they would otherwise be, they are the complete opposite of normal games or vacations. Adventure sports and tours reverse the general definition of a holiday as being an escape from the seriousness of everyday life, as in most cases, they are innately serious, requiring as they do 'life or death' decision-making. Beginning with the rise in colonial explorations and moving on to consider the Dangerous Sports Club of Oxford, this book examines the increasing phenomena of adventure sports such as bungy jumping, cliff jumping or 'tomb-stoning', surfing and parkour within a framework of positive risk. It explores how certain assumptions about knowledge, agency, the body and nature are beginning to coalesce around newly developing spheres of social relations. Additionally, extreme games have become activities that are germane to the dawning of green social thought and so the book also addresses issues that deal with the intimate connections that exist between pleasure and the moral responsibility towards the environment.

This volume aims to map out the complex relationships leisure has with notions of place and space in contemporary life. Illustrating the transdisciplinarity of this key feature of leisure studies, it explores how leisure places and spaces affect personal, social and collective identities.

This handbook provides an overview and synthesis of relevant literature related to leisure and recreation, and physical activity and its relationship to quality of life. Divided into two parts, the text presents the analysis of leisure and recreation studies and physical activities and sports, with diverse populations. The first part deals with leisure and recreation in relation to quality of life, with different perspectives on different age groups, ethnic groups, the approach of an Integrated Model of Leisure Well-being focusing on how leisure activities contribute to leisure well-being etc. The second part deals with physical activities and sports in relation to quality of life, discussing the consideration that "exercise is good for you", associating physical exercise with other conditions of life in society, its impact on people with disabilities, etc. It is of interest to researchers and students, legislators, educators, providers of leisure services.

This book explores historical and philosophical connections between music, leisure, and education. Specifically, it considers how music learning, teaching, and participation can be reconceptualized in terms of leisure. Taking as its starting point the art of living and the ethical question of how one should live, the book engages a wide range of scholarship to problematize the place of non-professional music-making in historical and contemporary (Western) conceptions of the good life and the common good. Part I provides a general background on music education, school music, the work ethic, leisure studies, recreation, play, and conduct. Part II focuses on two significant currents of thought and activity during the Progressive Era in the United States, the settlement movement and the recreation movement. The examination demonstrates how societal concerns over conduct (the threat of leisure) and differing views on the purpose of music learning and teaching led to a fracturing between those espousing generalist and specialist positions. The four chapters of Part III take readers through considerations of happiness (eudaimonia) and the good life, issues of work-life balance and the play spirit, leisure satisfaction in relation to consumerism, individualism, and the common good, and finally, parenting logics in relation to extracurriculars, music learning, and serious leisure.

This “engaging social history of play” explores how technology and culture have shaped toys, games, and leisure—and vice versa (Choice). In this romp through the changing landscape of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American toys, games, hobbies, and amusements, technology historian Carroll Pursell poses a simple but interesting question: What can we learn by studying the relationship between technology and play? From Playgrounds to PlayStation explores how play reflects and drives the evolution of American culture. Pursell engagingly examines the ways in which technology affects play and play shapes people. The objects that children (and adults) play with and play on, along with their games and the hobbies they pursue, can reinforce but also challenge gender roles and cultural norms. Inventors—who often talk about “playing” at their work, as if motivated by the pure fun of invention—have used new materials and technologies to reshape sports and gameplay, sometimes even crafting new, extreme forms of recreation, but always responding to popular demand. Drawing from a range of sources, including scholarly monographs, patent records, newspapers, and popular and technical journals, the book covers numerous modes and sites of play. Pursell touches on the safety-conscious playground reform movement, the dazzling mechanical innovations that gave rise to commercial amusement parks, and the media’s colorful promotion of toys, pastimes, and sporting events. Along the way, he shows readers how technology enables the forms, equipment, and devices of play to evolve constantly, both reflecting consumer choices and driving innovators and manufacturers to promote toys that involve entirely new kinds of play—from LEGOs and skateboards to beading kits and videogames.

This important new study examines the changing place and meaning of lifestyle sports – parkour, surfing, skateboarding, kite-surfing and others – and asks whether they continue to pose a challenge to the dominant meanings and experience of ‘sport’ and physical culture. Drawing on a series of in-depth, empirical case-studies, the book offers a re-evaluation of theoretical frameworks with which lifestyle sports have been understood, and focuses on aspects of their cultural politics that have received little attention, particularly the racialization of lifestyle sporting spaces. Centrally, it re-assess the political potential of lifestyle sports, considering if lifestyle sports cultures present alternative identities and spaces that challenge the dominant ideologies of sport, and the broader politics of identity, in the 21st century. It explores a range of key contemporary themes in lifestyle sport, including: identity and the politics of difference commercialization and globalization sportscapes, media discourse and lived reality risk and responsibility governance and regulation the racialization of lifestyle sports spaces lifestyle sports outside of the Global North the use of lifestyle sport to engage non-privileged youth Casting new light on the significance of sport and sporting subcultures within contemporary society, this book is essential reading for students or researcher working in the sociology of sport, leisure studies or cultural studies.

"This reference provides a review of the academic and popular literature on the relationship between communications and media studies, cinema, advertising, public relations, religion, food tourism, art, sports, technology, culture, marketing, and entertainment practices"--Provided by publisher.

An Anthropology of Landscape tells the fascinating story of a heathland landscape in south-west England and the way different individuals and groups engage with it. Based on a long-term anthropological study, the book emphasises four individual themes: embodied identities, the landscape as a sensuous material form that is acted upon and in turn acts on people, the landscape as contested, and its relation to emotion. The landscape is discussed in relation to these themes as both ‘taskscape’ and ‘leisurescape’, and from the perspective of different user groups. First, those who manage the landscape and use it for work: conservationists, environmentalists, archaeologists, the Royal Marines, and quarrying interests. Second, those who use it in their leisure time: cyclists and horse riders, model aircraft flyers, walkers, people who fish there, and artists who are inspired by it. The book makes an innovative contribution to landscape studies and will appeal to all those interested in nature conservation, historic preservation, the politics of nature, the politics of identity, and an anthropology of Britain.