This article examines how racialised belonging and digital self-tracking shape experiences of outdoor leisure in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on a critical autoethnography of trail running at a South African mountain marathon, it argues that mountain trails are socially produced leisure spaces structured by race, gender, class, and colonial histories of land and access. Using Lefebvre's theory of the production of space alongside scholarship on racial geographies, embodiment, and the politics of belonging, the article shows how GPS watches, tracking apps, and performance metrics mediate both physical effort and social visibility. While these technologies promise optimisation, motivation, and self-knowledge, they also intensify comparison, surveillance, and affective experiences of not belonging within historically white, elite outdoor recreation cultures. Through autoethnographic vignettes, the analysis demonstrates how trail running becomes a site where embodied movement, data practices, and spatial politics intersect, revealing how leisure practices reproduce and make visible broader inequalities. The article brings together critical leisure studies on race and outdoor recreation, scholarship on the quantified self, and post-apartheid spatial geography.
The profile of blockchain-based technologies such as collectable non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has ascended rapidly in recent years. This ascent is evident by major sponsorships of sporting teams, leagues and stadiums, licencing deals, NFT 'drops', and advertising campaigns. This article explains and analyses these complex and fast-changing developments using a political economy of communication approach that is linked to the field of leisure studies. It draws on the trade press as a key source of evidence, thereby revealing the 'storylines' used by industry to construct and legitimate NFTs as a consumer product. We argue that this process relies on legitimating practices and discourses that function to transmogrify the unfamiliar - blockchain technologies and NFTs in this case - into the familiar, despite the many problems associated with them, including company failures, suspect advertising practices, and intellectual property infringement. This is achieved by the presentation of NFTs as collectable fan tokens, linking them discursively to a long history of sport collectables as a hobby and form of leisure (e.g. physical trading cards, athlete autographs and memorabilia). The overall outcome is a deeply problematic vision of leisure for collectors as their practices are subject to ever-expanding financialisation, digital enclosure and uncertain value.
Indoor cycling has emerged as a salient form of digitally mediated leisure shaped by the converging forces of spatial indoorisation and digitalisation. However, few studies have examined how these dynamics intersect to produce hybrid experiences that destabilise conventional binaries, such as real versus fake and actual versus virtual. This study investigated how indoor cycling platforms reconfigure leisure practices and sensory engagement with movement. Informed by the mobilities paradigm, the study viewed indoor cycling as a cultural formation situated at the intersection of physical, digital, and social rhythms, not as a derivative of outdoor sport. Employing a qualitative methodology, data were obtained from 12 regular users of platforms such as Zwift through in-depth interviews, participant observation, and digital artefact analysis. The findings suggested that indoor cycling enables participants to negotiate daily constraints, engage in immersive and data-intensive bodily practices, foster real-time virtual co-presence, and evoke affective connections with real-world places. These entangled practices generate lived affective mobilities that exceed those of mere simulations. In these practices, the convergence of digital and spatial dimensions may be understood as a form of hybrid mobility. This perspective offers insights into how digital platforms mediate the emerging configurations of movement, connection, and technologically embedded leisure.
This autoethnographic study explores the transformative potential of philosophical leisure through a month-long personal experiment in adopting a vegan diet. Drawing on the first author's personal reflections, the study examines how lifestyle change, when approached as a form of radical leisure, can prompt ethical self-inquiry, challenge normative cultural practices, and cultivate autonomy. Framed by philosophical perspectives on enlightenment, agency and moral freedom, the research investigates whether veganism constitutes a meaningful ethical practice or a performative stance within dominant societal structures. This study critically reflects on the tensions between tradition and transformation, brave thinking and current ethics. By reordering the paper to begin with method and auth-ethnographic reflections before reviewing literature, the authors hold the grounded theory ethos of entering the field without preconception. Ultimately, the paper argues that confronting ingrained habits through lifestyle experimentation can serve as a form of philosophical and ethical awakening, inviting broader reflection on values of leisure, the fluidity of self, and the possibilities of living otherwise.
The leisure activity of digital gaming has seen an explosive increase in players worldwide, to the point that some scholars speak of a ludic society or a ludic century. Despite this, the sociological mechanisms regulating the gameplay preferences and practices of ludic citizens remain understudied. The aim of this study, thus, is to explore, understand and explain how the social reproduction of players of digital games occurs - by focusing on the individual biographies of players and identifying the differences in self-understanding of players within the game of gaming. Returning to Bourdieu's original concepts of doxa, illusio and of capital as a transmutable resource functioning on a symbolic market, the article provides empirical examples of how differing capital volumes shape different gaming outcomes. Based on in-depth interviews with 36 Swedish players, and structured through an ideal-type analysis, the article presents an index of how different forms of capital function in determining the positions and dispositions of different players. The results suggest that players more invested in gaming are more materialistically inclined and, likewise, more socially active in their leisure activity, whereas players less invested in gaming are less prone to play with other players, but more invested in achieving self-fulfilment out-of-gaming.
Sporting events in super-diverse cities generate communitas amongst participants managing multiple cultural positions simultaneously, yet sports scholarship primarily interprets these experiences through frameworks presuming sequential transformation. Sport event studies have given limited attention to postcolonial concepts of permanent liminality. This matters because super-diverse sporting contexts differ from temporary threshold states in conventional rites of passage. Through semi-structured interviews with sixteen participants in Liverpool's World in One City football tournament, we demonstrate how the tournament generates Turnerian communitas as concentrated episodes within ongoing navigation of territorial boundaries, hybrid heritage positions and organisational precarity. The tournament does not resolve cultural difference; instead, it ritualises existing cultural negotiation, honouring permanent in-betweenness. We extend Bhabha's permanent liminality to grassroots sport, demonstrating how intercultural communitas gains significance through episodic concentration within permanent conditions rather than facilitating transformation towards stable integration. This reconceptualisation prevents misinterpreting ongoing cultural negotiation as failed integration. We suggest practitioners and policymakers recognise permanent organisational liminality as a structural condition of legitimate grassroots initiatives, building evaluation frameworks attuned to authentic, yet precarious, contexts rather than institutionally stable organisations.
This study examines the football experiences of Turkish and German female footballers through the lens of Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, and habitus. Based on a qualitative research design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 participants. Thematic analysis revealed three main themes: unequal early access shaped by familial, educational, and structural capital, being seen to be believed: symbolic capital and role models in football, and experiencing & imath;nequality: material, symbolic, and structural barriers in women's football. Although both contexts reproduce gender inequality, Germany offers stronger institutional support, symbolic recognition, and role models. In contrast, Turkish players face limited access, conservative norms, and low visibility, often relying on physical education teachers. Symbolic capital, institutional investment, and cultural norms shape legitimacy and access in both contexts. Despite national differences, female footballers in T & uuml;rkiye and Germany face challenges in overcoming systems that perpetuate gender inequalities. This study contributes to feminist sports literature by revealing how gender-based inequalities persist across national contexts and calls for transformative strategies to support women's football.
Online abuse, especially in the context of sport and leisure, is a growing and required area of study. Athletes, journalists and officials have been notably subject to various forms of abuse on major social media platforms, and this, in turn, has prompted responses from scholars, media organisations and sports authorities. One stakeholder who's experience of online abuse has gone largely unexamined, however, is fans. In existing research, fans have generally been conceived of as perpetrators of abuse. The potential for them to be victims of abuse or, indeed, active participants in the struggle against it, has been overlooked, leaving the risk that fans may be regarded by authorities as a problem to be managed. To address this dearth, we have conducted a survey of over 2000 football (soccer) fans, gathering insights on their opinions and experience of online abuse in the sport they follow. Our findings reveal not only the impact, specifically on well-being, and regularity of online abuse suffered by fans, but also point towards what triggers abuse against them and how some of them end up perpetrating abuse. In doing so, this paper asserts the significance of leisure as a social milieu for understanding online abuse.
In Denmark, as in other countries, policymakers and municipalities seek to promote leisure-time physical activity among children and adolescents. However, many initiatives focus on the individual child, overlooking the role of parents in children's leisure practices. In contrast, a system-oriented family coaching approach was developed as part of an intervention aimed at involving parents in supporting their children's leisure-time physical activity. Drawing on qualitative methods, reflexive thematic analysis and utilising a symbolic interactionist perspective, this paper examines how participating children, parents, and family coaches interact in ascribing meaning to physical activity and identify actions to support the child's participation. The results showed that the issue of finding a meaningful leisure activity for the child often turned out to be a negotiation between the parents and the child that was mediated by the coach. Furthermore, when parents were not in a position to support their child's leisure-time physical activity dilemmas arose for both the coaches and the parents. By illuminating these interactional dynamics, the paper offers new insights into both the opportunities and challenges of utilising systemic family coaching as a strategy for engaging parents in their children's leisure-time physical activity.
