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.
In this article, we investigate the discursive context of community-based youth centers to critically interrogate ideas and practices concerning leisure, youth, and youth centers. Using publicly ...available documents and data collected with youth at two community-based youth centers, we ask, what is the "good"' they do for young people, and how do young people negotiate these discourses? We argue that youth centers operate in a discursive tension, constructed as a place to change by the (organizational) bodies that establish them, and a place to chill by the (youth) bodies that use them. We trace how these discourses entered into the everyday lived contexts of youth centers, including their program logics, measures of success, and constructions of youthful subjectivities. We close with a discussion of the implications of the research in terms of how youth and recreation practitioners might use youth centers to support young people's leisure.
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.
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.
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.
This paper evaluates the impact of a large-scale, community agency-driven initiative to increase physical activity (PA) in after-school programs in Ontario. In 2008, the YMCA and Boys and Girls Club ...(BGC) introduced CATCH Kids Club (CKC) into 330 after-school program sites.
This study assessed the impact of the intervention on the quality and quantity of PA using a pretest/posttest quasi-experimental research design with a comparison non-CKC group. Data were collected at baseline (September 2008) and postintervention (May/June 2009) using the System for Observing Fitness Instruction Time (SOFIT).
Nearly all sites, with the exception of the BGC baseline program (a sports program) achieved greater than 50% of time spent in MVPA. Significant differences were not found between levels of MVPA at CKC and comparison sites (59.3% vs. 64.2%), or at CKC sites at baseline versus postintervention (59.3% vs. 52.1%). BGC sites had significantly higher levels MVPA in CKC programs than in sports programs (70.8% vs. 35.2%). In postimplementation interviews, leaders reported general support but some mixed reactions related to how the program was received by participants.
This paper offers support for PA programs that focus on inclusivity and enjoyment and emphasize the important role of staff competency.
In this research note, we situate the policy response of park circles enacted by the City of Toronto at Trinity Bellwoods Park in the context of urban gentrification. Rather than a public health ...measure, we argue that the enactment of park circles as a response to park crowding during the COVID-19 pandemic is reflective of broader processes of gentrification and operates to secure the park as a space for 'hipster leisure.' In so doing, park circles represent an extension of neo-liberal policy rhetoric whereby the privatization of public space and the displacement of certain populations are naturalized. Our analysis invites future critical scholarship on parks, leisure, public health, and gentrification as well as the transformations occurring within these intersections.
This paper offers an ethnographic account of the emotional labor of adventure guides at Wanderlust, an outdoor adventure trip provider. Three of the guide responsibilities involved emotion work: ...ensuring safety, generating fun, and encouraging a sense of community. This created a demanding and prescriptive set of emotional expectations for guides, which they attempted to manage using a variety of strategies. While guides came to see their organizational role as a persona that they enacted on trail, they resisted the notion that they were acting. Overall, the examination of emotional labor of guides makes apparent the extent to which outdoor adventure resembles fantasy. However, the fantastical characteristics tend to be overshadowed by the discourse of authenticity that surrounds outdoor adventure.
This paper offers an ethnographic account of Wilderness Inquiry (WI), a leisure service provider with the organizational goal of delivering communitas, an intense form of social bonding. At WI, ...delivering communitas was linked to broader social goals of social integration and equality. However, WI was also a leisure provider, and participants arrived expecting a leisure experience. The paper provides an ethnographic account of how the organization and its trip leaders went about delivering communitas, emphasizing the key elements of establishing the mission, selecting and training trip leaders, setting the tone, maximizing authority, and guiding interpretations. This study concludes by raising some general questions about authenticity, community, and structural transformation when leisure is used as a setting for delivering communitas.
In an era of declining volunteerism it is critical to examine alternative approaches to volunteer management that may better promote engagement and address common barriers to volunteering. Using a ..."best practices" Canadian case study approach, this research describes an alternative approach to volunteer engagement that emphasizes lifestyle integration, organizational informality and flexibility, and volunteer–agency collaboration. We suggest that traditional volunteer management structures may actually be hindering engagement and call instead for a more vocation-based, networked, and collaborative approach which affords greater autonomy to the volunteer and sees power being shared between agencies and volunteers. Dans une ère de déclin du bénévolat, il est impératif d'examiner des approches alternatives propres à mieux promouvoir sa gestion et résoudre ce qui fait lui fait obstacle. En ce référent aux «meilleures pratiques» d'une étude de cas canadienne, cette recherche décrit une alternative de façon à ce que l'engagement bénévole mette l'accent sur l'intégration du style de vie, l'absence de formalité organisationnelle garante de souplesse, et en collaboration avec des agences se consacrant au bénévolat. Nous suggérons que les structures de gestion du bénévolat traditionnelles peuvent en fait entraver leur engagement mais emmener dans son sillage un élément permettant une plus grande autonomie et partager équitablement l'action conjointe des agences et des bénévoles. In einer Ära von rückläufiger ehrenamtlicher Tätigkeit ist es entscheidend, alternative Ansätze zum Management von ehrenamtlichen Helfern zu prüfen, die möglicherweise besser das Engagement fördern und auf verbreitete Barrieren zum Volontieren eingehen. Die "best practices" einer kanadischen Fallstudienmethode nutzend beschreibt diese Untersuchung einen alternativen Ansatz zum Management von Ehrenamtlichen, der Integration des Lebensstils, organisatorische Zwanglosigkeit und Flexibilität und Zusammenarbeit von Ehrenamtlichen und Agentur betont. Wir behaupten, dass traditionelle Strukturen des Managements von Ehrenamtlichen sogar Engagement behindern kann und fordern stattdessen eine mehr berufsbasierte, vernetzte und gemeinschaftliche Herangehensweise, die dem ehrenamtlichen Helfer größere Autonomie bietet und die Macht zwischen Agenturen und Ehrenamtlichen teilt. En una época de declive del voluntariado, es esencial examinar los enfoques alternativos a la gestión de los voluntarios que mejor fomentarían el compromiso y derribarían las barreras comunes al voluntariado. Enfocándonos en un estudio de caso canadiense para las mejores prácticas, este estudio describe un método alternativo al compromiso de los voluntarios que hace hincapié en la integración en el estilo de vida, la informalidad y la flexibilidad organizativa y la colaboración en organismos de voluntarios. Sugerimos que las estructuras tradicionales de gestión voluntaria pueden ser un obstáculo al compromiso y exigimos un enfoque más colaborador, organizado en red y basado en la vocación que permita una mayor autonomía a los voluntarios y busque un reparto de poder entre los organismos y los voluntarios.
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