Given the growing impact of right-wing, anti-immigration political actors in various geographic contexts, this research critically examines the structural conditions shaping sport-based integration initiatives for asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants in England and Hungary; two countries characterized by increasingly hostile political landscapes towards immigrants. Drawing on original observations of sport inclusion programmes and in-depth semi-structured interviews with charity delivery staff, the study investigates how prevailing political and sociocultural attitudes towards migration shape the possibilities and limits of such initiatives. Our use of a Bourdieusian theoretical framework is deployed to examine how sport can simultaneously operate as a mechanism of inclusion, fostering integration and social connection, and exclusion, reinforcing boundaries of nationhood and belonging. By examining the perceptions of programme delivery staff in hostile socio-political environments, we offer novel insights into the structural constraints on sport-based integration work and the strategies through which practitioners negotiate symbolic violence, precarious funding, and anti-immigration discourse in both national contexts.
This research note examines the rapid growth of padel in urban Indonesia as a case of neoliberal leisure consumption. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of 15 media and industry texts published between 2024 and 2025, the study reads its material through two compatible lenses: Bourdieu's theory of distinction and Foucault's account of governmentality, including the technologies of the self and the self-surveillance associated with the panoptic gaze. It analyses how padel is discursively constructed not merely as a sport but as a leisure lifestyle that produces class-differentiated urban subjects. Three interconnected mechanisms are identified: padel as a technology of the self through which players take up leisure as a site of self-optimization; a pricing structure that sorts participants by class while being framed as inclusive; and what we term communitarian panopticism, a mode of leisure-based self-surveillance oriented toward social belonging rather than individual body-monitoring. The class being produced is specific rather than generic: an urban professional middle class, older and more affluent than the younger working-class public associated with futsal, marks itself off through where, how, and with whom it plays.
Leisure research often operates within Eurocentric assumptions about free time, autonomy, and individual choice, while practices in the Global South are frequently treated as cultural variations rather than sources of theory. This research note introduces Leisure Consciousness as an interpretive approach for examining how communities negotiate the meanings and conditions of leisure within unequal social contexts. Drawing on critiques emerging from Sport-for-Development and engaging with Latin American scholarship on leisure, coloniality, and epistemic dependency, the paper adapts the political-pedagogical logic of the Sport Consciousness Model to leisure studies. Leisure Consciousness approaches leisure as a space where inequality may be interpreted, negotiated, and organized through community practices. Rather than assuming leisure to be inherently emancipatory, the paper examines the conditions under which leisure practices may become spaces of dialogue, spatial negotiation, and collective organization within unequal social realities.
This study adopts an analytic autoethnographic approach to examine how surfing culture is experienced and interpreted across multiple stakeholder roles, including participant, parent, volunteer, and event organizer. The analysis integrates stakeholder theory with social identity and self-categorization theory to explore how cultural norms, hierarchies, and practices are negotiated through these intersecting positions. The findings demonstrate that surfing culture is not experienced as a uniform or stable construct, but is mediated by role-dependent expectations, identities, and responsibilities. Core cultural dynamics - such as hierarchy, localism, gendered participation, and competitive pathways - are interpreted differently across stakeholder roles, revealing tensions between inclusion and exclusion, participation and control, and lifestyle values and increasing formalization. These role-based differences highlight how individuals simultaneously reproduce and challenge aspects of surfing culture in practice. The study contributes to surf studies and sport management literature by extending understanding of lifestyle sport cultures through a multi-stakeholder lens. Theoretically, it demonstrates how stakeholder theory, social identity theory, and self-categorization theory intersect to explain how cultural norms are maintained and contested across contexts. Methodologically, it illustrates the value of analytic autoethnography in moving beyond descriptive accounts of lived experience to interrogate the relationship between identity, culture, and governance in sport.
This study examines how women-only running groups in Qatar navigate resource dependencies that shape their capacity to facilitate women's sport participation. Drawing on interviews with 20 participants across four groups, the analysis identifies three interrelated dimensions structuring participation: moral authorization, through which running is framed as health-oriented and culturally legitimate; spatial and symbolic enablers, including access to private environments, women-only race events, and curated public visibility; and relational resource strategies, encompassing community-building, stakeholder negotiation, culturally aligned leadership, and accessible financial models. Rather than positioning gender-exclusive spaces as transitional accommodations, the findings demonstrate how such environments function as participation-enabling infrastructures by aligning ambition, visibility, and legitimacy with locally resonant norms. Integrating resource dependency theory with feminist leisure scholarship, the study reconceptualizes women-only sport groups as organizational actors that strategically manage asymmetrical power conditions and reshape their resource environments through cultural alignment rather than direct confrontation with prevailing cultural and institutional norms. The analysis contributes to debates on gender, legitimacy, and participation by illustrating how culturally embedded constraints can be transformed into enabling conditions. Practical implications include expanding access to private sport spaces, supporting culturally aligned leadership development, and recognizing relational and symbolic resources as central to sustainable participation pathways.
This study examines how leisure experiences relate to sustainable consumption behaviour through leisure crafting and psychological resilience among urban park users in Konya, T & uuml;rkiye. The model is based on a context-based interpretation of the Value-Belief-Norm framework. Data were collected from 377 participants using a structured questionnaire. The study used PLS-SEM to test direct and indirect relationships. The results show that leisure awareness, challenge, and distress predict leisure crafting, while boredom shows a weak negative effect. Leisure experiences have limited effects on resilience. Leisure crafting predicts environmental awareness, saving, and reusability, but not non-essential purchase. Resilience has weaker and selective effects on outcomes. Mediation results show that leisure crafting plays a significant role between leisure experiences and sustainable behaviours, while resilience does not act as a mediator. The findings indicate that active engagement in leisure is more important than passive experience. The study highlights that sustainable consumption behaviour depends on specific psychological processes. It also shows that different behavioural outcomes respond to different mechanisms.
Although the historical kingdom of Champa (2nd-19th centuries) was located in present-day Vietnam, the majority of the Cham people now live in Cambodia. This displacement reflects a long history of territorial loss and colonization by the Vietnamese state, rendering the Cham a refugee nation. This paper investigates Cham poetry as a vital medium for cultural survival, collective memory, and resistance. Focusing on several classical poems Ariya and contemporary works by Cham poet and writer Inrasara, it demonstrates how poetic expression encodes historical trauma, religious identity, and communal values. Drawing on oral literature theory, ethnopoetics, and decolonial approaches, the paper shows how Cham poetry transmits memory across generations and safeguards intangible cultural heritage amid marginalization and diaspora. These oral traditions are conveyed through communal and recreational practices such as poetry, storytelling, and ritual performance, which also mediate trauma and affirm identity. In this way, the paper contributes to leisure studies by reframing poetic performance as a culturally embedded form of leisure and a site of knowledge production, extending dominant understandings of leisure beyond recreation or consumption.
The ableist imaginary assigns a social identity to intellectually disabled people that renders their impairment the most relevant feature of their lives: as a result, other aspects of their identity are ignored. Leisure participation offers an opportunity for intellectually disabled people to assert a personal identity based on other aspects of their person. The role of social practices is an important but to date overlooked aspect of this. This qualitative study applies Unruh's (1979, 1980) social world perspective to investigate whether and how involvement with Special Olympics Great Britain (an organization that delivers sports programmes for intellectually disabled people) facilitates intellectually disabled people's claiming of an athlete identity. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews (n = 26 interviewees), half of whom were intellectually disabled (11 were athletes and two were athlete/coaches), and the remainder who were non-disabled (a mixture of club administrators, coaches, volunteers and/or family members). Participant observation was also carried out at training sessions over a period of 3 months as a form of triangulation. Findings have many parallels with studies of non-disabled people's sports social worlds, but also serve to highlight the complex, fluid and paradoxical nature of disabled identity negotiation.
Visually impaired individuals experience heightened leisure exclusion compared to non-disabled peers due to sensory and environmental barriers. From liminality theory perspective, this study employed constructivist grounded theory to reveal the evolutionary patterns of constraints and negotiation mechanisms during their limited participation in outdoor leisure activities. Semi-structured interviews with 14 visually impaired participants and 5 sighted social network members revealed that: (1) Prior to limited participation, achieving threshold transition necessitates foundational conditions of personal ability breakthrough and accumulated social capital, accelerated by facility configuration response and economic policy subsidies; (2) During participation, multi-layered environmental systems influence negotiation efficacy through conflict, synergy, and balance; (3) Successful threshold transitioners demonstrate tripartite positive transformation in heightened autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The innovatively proposed Threshold Transition model underpinned development of accessible and inclusive leisure service systems. It reorients policymakers from physical facility improvements toward establishing systemic support throughout leisure participation processes for marginalized populations, safeguarding their leisure rights.
This study explores how Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and hyperplanning shape Generation Z's lived experiences and enjoyment of events. Adopting a qualitative, phenomenological approach, the research aims not to measure the prevalence of FOMO, but to understand how it emerges, how it influences event planning behaviours, and how these processes affect subjective enjoyment. Data were collected through sixteen semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Generation Z participants who had attended festivals or social events. Interviews were conducted online and face-to-face, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings reveal four central themes: (1) social and digital pressures as drivers of hyperplanning, (2) the ambivalent role of planning in shaping anticipation and anxiety, (3) qualitative differences between participants with and without FOMO, and (4) perceived responsibilities of event organizers in managing expectations. The study contributes to event and leisure research by offering an in-depth qualitative understanding of how emotional, cognitive, and social dynamics converge in the construction of event enjoyment among Generation Z.
The mental health crisis within trans communities is well-documented, linked to systemic discrimination, cisheteronormativity, and social isolation. While urban spaces can offer community and leisure spaces, they are also sites of intense scrutiny for trans individuals. This article shifts the gaze from the urban to the outdoors, critically examining how trans individuals negotiate their mental health and wellbeing through participation in outdoor leisure. Drawing on a multisited ethnographic study this research explores the emotional and affective dimensions of trans experiences in outdoor spaces. Findings reveal a complex duality. Participants consistently described outdoor leisure as a therapeutic reprieve from cisheteronormative surveillance, fostering self-confidence, resilience, and gender euphoria. These activities functioned as active self-care, with participants framing them as life-saving practices for managing mental health challenges, from stress and anxiety to depression and suicidality. However, these potentialities coexist with structural barriers. The study interrogates how leisure constraints function as a form of trans necropolitics - the gradual, structural exclusion that "kills softly" - by limiting access to the healing potential of nature. In response, the article highlights how trans individuals are active agents fostering inclusive outdoor leisure environments, creating affinity groups, advocating for inclusion, and building communities of care through digital platforms.
International leisure travel is deemed therapeutic for reducing stress and improving mental health and wellbeing, although unfamiliar environments can exacerbate pre-existing mental health conditions. Travel insurance plays a crucial role in mitigating risks for travellers. There is a lack of critical evaluation regarding how insurers assess risk, determine coverage eligibility and communicate exclusions. International travel insurance policies may contain restrictive clauses, ambiguous wording and outright exclusions that may disproportionately disadvantage travellers with pre-existing conditions, including mental health conditions. This paper evaluates whether New Zealand's international travel insurance policies adequately accommodate travellers with pre-existing mental health conditions. Analysis of 23 international travel insurance policies revealed common challenges relating to exclusion, disclosure and potential stigma and discrimination. New Zealand's policies were found to vary significantly in how they addressed pre-existing mental health conditions, with many lacking clear definitions and offering limited or conditional coverage. Policies required medical disclosure, stability periods, additional assessments or higher premiums before granting coverage, which may generate anxiety and present significant challenges for travellers living with mental health conditions. These patterns suggest uneven treatment and may contribute to the persistence of stigma, making it difficult for travellers living with mental health conditions to obtain inclusive and comprehensive coverage.
Running is often romanticised as an act of lacing up shoes, finding freedom on the road, yet in practice, it is ritually pursued to clear the mind, strengthen mental health and enhance emotional well-being. It represents autonomy, agency, and mobility - qualities that are frequently negotiated through leisure constraints. Against this backdrop, the paper examines the leisure constraints faced by women in nighttime running, focusing on the chronic stress, harassment risks, and infrastructural barriers that are associated and prevalent in global cities worldwide. It further explores the anticipatory anxiety and hypervigilance produced by gendered leisure spaces through a discourse analysis of Nike's After Dark tour, a 10 K running and half-marathon series organised in 2025 across seven host cities: Sydney, Shanghai, Seoul, Mumbai, Los Angeles, Mexico City and London. The analysis draws on Nike event pages, media coverage, participant social media content and safety audit reports as key texts. These are interpreted through Crawford and colleagues' Leisure Constraints framework. The analysis also suggests that the event temporarily alleviated (i) intrapersonal, (ii) interpersonal, and (iii) structural constraints of leisure. It did so by arranging well-lit routes, peer running groups, and similar strategies, thereby reducing psychological stresses and improving emotional vitality. Emotional well-being is experienced as joy and freedom of movement, but it remains curtailed by structural, familiar, and safety-related barriers in urban night spaces. By analysing this event, the paper reveals how leisure constraints have an impact on women's emotional regulation in urban nighttime spaces.
Given the well-documented benefits of subjective well-being (SWB) (Diener & Chan, 2011; Mart & iacute;n-Mar & iacute;a et al., 2020), consumers increasingly seek experiences that may enhance it. Leisure travel is widely recognized as one such experience, yet its relationship with SWB remains only partially understood and often examined through isolated indicators (Yan et al., 2024). This study contributes to this line of research by conceptualizing leisure travel as a multidimensional form of engagement encompassing past travel frequency, future travel intentions, and perceived barriers. Based on survey data from 1,314 adults in Quebec (Canada), this study examines differences in SWB between leisure and non-leisure travellers and identifies distinct travel profiles through latent class analysis. Results show that leisure travellers report higher SWB than their non-leisure counterparts. Three profiles emerge, namely occasional, moderate, and avid travellers, with avid travellers reporting the highest SWB. Overall, the findings suggest that more favourable forms of travel engagement are associated with higher SWB and point to the importance of improving access to leisure travel as a potential lever for well-being.
Contemporary leisure scholarship has increasingly critiqued leisure's purpose as the freedom of choice, pleasure and satisfaction, calling for its re-evaluation beyond hedonic autonomy towards meaning, virtue and sustainability. This commentary argues that this emerging critique remains anthropologically under-theorized. Drawing on the moral philosophy of Abai Qunanbaiuly (1845-1904), a foundational Kazakh thinker, it proposes an evaluative framework for leisure grounded in moral self-formation. Abai's integration of reason (aqyl), heart (zhurek), and will (qairat) offers a non-Western philosophical lens through which leisure can be understood not as freely chosen enjoyment but as a practice contributing to ethical growth and human flourishing. Rather than positioning Abai in opposition to Western leisure theory, the commentary demonstrates how his ideas can deepen contemporary calls to re-think leisure. Three conceptual propositions are offered to guide future research, bridging Global South perspectives and on-going Western debates on meaningful leisure.
