Search

Many recreation and leisure professionals are looking for opportunities to upgrade their skills and knowledge in the context of their work. For some professionals that involves returning to post-secondary education. Yet, most undergraduate degree programs are designed in formats for students who are assumed to have little prior professional experience, knowledge, and skills and who do not work full-time. As such, in 2016, Brock University in partnership with Centennial College, launched a university degree pathway program for recreation and leisure professionals. In this paper we explore experiences of recreation and leisure professionals enrolled in the degree pathway program. The findings highlight how students navigated (and attempted to balance) full-time studies while managing competing priorities and responsibilities in their personal and professional lives. In the discussion, we share implications of this research for curriculum developers interested in designing post-secondary programs for diverse students.

In contemporary western society connections with others have become more fluid. This fluidity, in turn, impacts how people think about, understand, and engage in leisure. For instance, more people are choosing to partake in leisure practices that have traditionally been done in the company of others, alone. Yet people who choose to engage in solo leisure may face stigmatization for doing so. With these ideas in mind, the purpose of this paper is to examine representations of dining out alone on Instagram associated with #tableforone. Our findings illustrate how people use #tableforone to represent the importance of valuing alone time and treating oneself. Our findings also demonstrate the ways #tableforone can be used to confront the stigma tied to engaging in public leisure practices alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tweet: #Altmetrics can shape how #leisure scholars think about sharing #research for greater public impact @LeisureSciences. Altmetrics, or "alternative metrics" measure scholarly and public engagement with scholarship through traditional metrics (e.g., citation counts) and contemporary metrics (e.g., mentions on social media and news outlets in real time). Since their emergence in 2010, they now play a role in the tenure process and factor into how scholars write articles and engage with social media to increase public consumption of their research (bridging the public/ivory tower/practitioner divide). In this research note, we describe altmetrics and answer some questions surrounding them. Questions we explore include: What are altmetrics? How are they calculated? What are the benefits of measuring scholarship in this way? What tensions exist in measuring scholarship in this way? How can leisure scholars engage with altmetrics? And why should leisure scholars/studies care about altmetrics? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a critical analysis of the uses of the hashtag '#feminism' on Twitter. To do so, we collected all English-language tweets shared publicly and containing the #feminism on Twitter in one 24-hour period and analyzed the content of those tweets. We found tweets with #feminism content served to (1) discuss understandings of feminism(s), (2) describe perceptions of feminists, (3) respond to/promote misogyny, and (4) express perceived relevance of feminism as a social movement. Beyond describing how #feminism is used in Twitter tweets, our findings inform our presentation of the use of #feminism to wield, shield, and troll feeds on feminism. We also discuss the opportunities for Twitter, as a digital leisure space, to be used to examine more closely complex, ongoing, and evolving conversations about feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although an increasing number of people are identifying as single in western society, gendered ideologies continue to influence women's lives, emphasising the importance of heterosexual couplehood, marriage, family, and biological parenthood. Utilising third wave feminism as our theoretical framework, this paper explores how gendered ideologies can work together to influence adult women's experiences with singlehood. Findings from qualitative interviews with 12 single, adult women, conducted in Ontario, Canada, reveal the ways women can face marginalisation and stigmatisation in certain leisure contexts because of their single status and how the ideology of couplehood can reinforce expectations related to familism and pronatalism for single women. Yet, the findings also illustrate the ways single women can resist these expectations through their leisure. This paper provides an important contribution to the literature, bringing attention to the complex ties between gendered ideologies and leisure for adult women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction as well as this entire special issue begin with the idea that for leisure scholars to stay relevant in our current society, the topic of digital leisure spaces and cultures should become a central rather than periphery focus. We suggest three courses of action for leisure scholars engaging in digital leisure scholarship: 1) We should emphasize what people do with the majority of their leisure time, 2) we should study it in a way that is timely and accessible, and 3) we should do so with a focus on social and environmental justice. This article introduces the special edition by providing a review of the key theorists currently working on digital leisure studies and an introduction of key concepts. We conclude with a Wikipedia page on digital leisure studies and an invitation to you, our reader, to help us write, think, and theorize the future of digital leisure studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to examine representations of women's leisure portrayed on the popular Netflix television series Orange Is the New Black (OITNB). Using a feminist lens rooted in the notion of interconnectivity, we draw on four television tropes proposed by Pozner (2010) that are commonly used to depict women characters on television to analyze representations of women's leisure in the first three seasons of OITNB. Our analysis reveals the complex and messy ways representations of women's leisure on OITNB can be used to discipline, reproduce, but also challenge power relations associated with common media tropes, acting as a form of political practice. We conclude by considering the implications of how these representations can influence the lives of women consuming this media content as part of their leisure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the possibilities for transformation that exist when a diverse group of participants interested in working together to change the culture of dementia care in long-term care and community care settings use appreciative participatory action research to guide their culture change efforts. These transformations happened throughout the culture change process using appreciative participatory action research. For instance, using appreciative participatory action research to guide the culture change process provided participants with the opportunity to build stronger professional and personal relationships in their respective care communities. Culture change transformations also stemmed from the appreciative participatory action research process, as participants recognized the importance of finding ways to include persons with dementia/residents in the process and they developed an appreciation for the valuable contributions persons with dementia/residents can make to culture change work. These culture chance possibilities demonstrate the value in using appreciative participatory action research to guide culture change in long-term care and community care contexts. These possibilities also illustrate the importance of paying closer attention to the culture change process itself, rather than solely the outcomes of the process, given that the possibilities for transformation that can take place throughout the process can help to build momentum, propelling culture change efforts forward in healthcare contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a feminist poststructural lens, this conceptual article aims to trouble patriarchal understandings of gossip as a devalued dimension of women's talk. To accomplish this aim, I focus on decentering three dominant discourses tied to women's gossip that position gossip as idle talk, based on the personal lives of others, and trivial. In particular, I consider the ways power is part of women's performances of gossip and how women can use gossip to construct, maintain, and resist gendered subjectivities as part of their leisure. This article also aims to illustrate the need for leisure researchers, and in particular feminist leisure researchers, to pay closer attention to the topic of women's gossip and the complex and messy connections between gossip, women's talk, and women's leisure lives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]