This book uses the work of Jurgen Habermas to interrogate leisure as a meaningful, theoretical concept. Drawing on examples from sport, culture and tourism, and going beyond concerns about the grand project of leisure, Spracklen argues that leisure is central to understanding wider debates about identity, postmodernity and globalization.

Winner of the 2007 Alan Merriam Prize presented by the Society for Ethnomusicology

aThe Games Black Girls Play is beautifully and passionately written. This book presents an engaging reflexive narrative that ranges from childhood memories to involvement with ethnomusicological scholarship. Gaunt makes a convincing argument that the playsongs of African American girls is the foundation of African diasporic popular music-making. In a radical counter-history, she shows how African American girls-interlocutors who are triply minoritized through race, gender, and age-are producing music culture that has profound influences on popular music and the popular imagination. She calls for an engaged ethnomusicology and moves gracefully through an array of anti-essentialist perspectives on race and gender. She argues that akinetic oralitya is key to African American musicking and that the body is always a locus of memory and communality. From somatic historiography to serious cross-talk with girls, Gaunt offers new methodologies for ethnomusicological work. The reader is pulled into a world in which Black girls are masters of musical knowledge, and in emerging from the book, we can't see the world of American popular music in the same way. When we chant Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack is dressed in black, black, black, with silver buttons, buttons, buttons, all down her back, back, back, we suddenly see how musical play and embodied knowledge generates a world of raced and gendered sociality. Oo-lay oo-lay! Congratulations, Kyra!a
--President Elect Professor Deborah Wong, Society for Ethnomusicology (October 27, 2007)

aFusing academic prose with vividly rendered memories, Gauntas journey isrefreshing. . . . Gaunt successfully lifts ignored girls from obscurity to center stage. . . . With The Games Black Girls Play, Gaunt has created a necessary space for translating black girlsa joy in a society that typically overlooks it. Hopefully, others will take their turn and jump in to keep the games going.a
--"Bitch"

"In thoughtful and affectionate prose, Gaunt makes plain how the schoolyard syncopations of body and voice are both oral-kinetic play and improvised lessons in socializing girls into the unique social practices of black urban life. . . . The Games Black Girls Play is a smart, delightful and witty polemic of attributions; a cultural benchmark of the complex web of history, race and gender to suggest a agendered musical blacknessa and an aethnographic trutha linking the aintergenerational cultures of black musical expressiona as embodied in the infectious playfulness of black girls."
--"Black Issues Book Review"

"Very informative and insightful. . . . A valuable source to add to oneas collection."
--"AllHipHop.com"

"By placing black girls at the center of her analysis, Kyra Gaunt challenges us to be ever mindful of the importance of gender, the body, and the everyday in our discussions of black music. "The Games Black Girls Play" is an exciting and original work that should forever transform the way we think about the sources of black, indeed American, popular music. This is a bold, brilliant, and beautifully written book."
--Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University

"The Games Black Girls Play not only makes the point that black girls matter, but that the games, thoughts, and passions of black girls matter in a world that regularly rendersblack girls invisible and silent. Gaunt brilliantly argues that the culture of black girls is a critical influence on contemporary black popular culture."
-- Mark Anthony Neal, author of" New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity"

"A particular strength of Gaunt's text is the ethnographic dimension of her discussions. The reader is privy to the personal musical and cultural experiences of African American females of varying ages (including Gaunt herself)."
--"New Black Man Book Review"

aIt is written in an accessible style and the inclusion of personal musical and cultural experiences and histories of a variety of women, including the author, adds to the appeal. The infectious playfulness of the topic and Gauntas own personal style and passion shine though.a
--"Journal of Folklore Research"

When we think of African American popular music, our first thought is probably not of double-dutch: girls bouncing between two twirling ropes, keeping time to the tick-tat under their toes. But this book argues that the games black girls play --handclapping songs, cheers, and double-dutch jump rope--both reflect and inspire the principles of black popular musicmaking.

The Games Black Girls Play illustrates how black musical styles are incorporated into the earliest games African American girls learn--how, in effect, these games contain the DNA of black music. Drawing on interviews, recordings of handclapping games and cheers, and her own observation and memories of gameplaying, Kyra D. Gaunt argues that black girls' games are connected to long traditions of African and African American musicmaking, and that they teach vital musical and social lessons that are carried intoadulthood. In this celebration of playground poetry and childhood choreography, she uncovers the surprisingly rich contributions of girls' play to black popular culture.

In neighbourhoods and public spaces across Britain, young working people walked out together, congregated in the streets, and paraded up and down on the 'monkey parades'. The beginnings of a distinct youth culture can be traced to the late nineteenth century, and the street and neighbourhood provided its forum. Dangerous amusements explores these sites of leisure and courtship, examining how young working-class men and women engaged with their environment. Drawing on an extensive range of sources, from newspapers and institutional records to oral histories and autobiography, this book traces the movements of young people across space. Exploring the relationship between the leisure lives of the young working class and urban space, this book offers a sensitive reappraisal of working-class youth and will be essential reading for historians of modern Britain. -- .

Globally, we find ourselves in a novel set of circumstances where our individual and collective relationships with leisure have changed dramatically and are being dictated less by personal preferences or even affluence, but rather by health, legal, and societal factors. There is very little published work on changed practices in leisure due to the pandemic, especially focusing on activities that were previously considered ordinary and perhaps even mundane. Contribute to the compilation of a historic record of the way the pandemic has transformed various leisure behaviours in diverse cultural and national contexts at this unprecedented time.

Occupational welfare is a distinctive solution to contemporary social policy dilemmas. Though it plays a substantial role in many countries, especially in pension provision, occupational welfare and its subtle links to the welfare state have been largely neglected by social scientists. This book, a collaborative effort by a distinguished group of experts, offers in-depth studies of occupational welfare in the US and Scandinavia. These chapters are complemented by discussions of two partially contrasting cases (Canada and Japan), an introductory overview, and a concluding comparative analysis.

Game Studies is a rapidly growing area of contemporary scholarship, yet volumes in the area have tended to focus on more general issues. With Playing with the Past, game studies is taken to the next level by offering a specific and detailed analysis of one area of digital game play -- the representation of history. The collection focuses on the ways in which gamers engage with, play with, recreate, subvert, reverse and direct the historical past, and what effect this has on the ways in which we go about constructing the present or imagining a future. What can World War Two strategy games teach us about the reality of this complex and multifaceted period? Do the possibilities of playing with the past change the way we understand history? If we embody a colonialist's perspective to conquer 'primitive' tribes in Colonization, does this privilege a distinct way of viewing history as benevolent intervention over imperialist expansion? The fusion of these two fields allows the editors to pose new questions about the ways in which gamers interact with their game worlds. Drawing these threads together, the collection concludes by asking whether digital games - which represent history or historical change - alter the way we, today, understand history itself.

Examining exactly what social scientists mean by the term tourism, and what it means to be a tourist, this collection charts the sociological changes that have occurred in tourism, as well as the shift from the upper-class a ~grand toursa (TM) of the late nineteenth-century to the mass tourism of the present day.

With an astonishing breadth and range of content, these fascinating volumes assess the economic impacts of tourism on local economies, the environmental considerations to take into account, and whether the huge growth in tourism is sustainable in a post-September 11th world.

Tourism: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences is an accessible and comprehensive resource that is invaluable for academics and scholars researching tourism, globalization and human geography.

This book provides the first dedicated introduction to the cultural writings and analyses of the radical West Indian thinker C.L.R. James. It lays out James' account of the way in which games, books, music and film become a part of the politics and history of popular struggles.

The study of consumption has never seriously examined the role of leisure. This ambitious, agenda-setting study, provides the most in-depth examination of the relationship between the two to date, drawing on the serious leisure perspective and outlining a new conceptual framework for analyzing consumption for leisure.

"Randy D. McBee's monograph opens up a new space for thinking about immigrant life, ethnicity, and youth in the context of social history."--"The Journal of American History"

"This is a very important book that draws together astute analyses of youth, gender, morals, amusements and ethnic history. After you read it, you will never look into faces on the old dance photos in the same way."
--"American Historical Review

"This book adds important new insights to a growing literature that explores day-to-day immigrant life through the lens of popular amusments."
--"Journal of American Ethnic History"

The rise of commercialized leisure coincided with the arrival of millions of immigrants to America's cities. Conflict was inevitable as older generations attempted to preserve their traditions, values, and ethnic identities, while the young sought out the cheap amusements and sexual freedom which the urban landscape offered. At immigrant picnics, social clubs, and urban dance halls, Randy McBee discovers distinct and highly contested gender lines, proving that the battle between the ages was also one between the sexes.

Free from their parents and their strict rules governing sexual conduct, working women took advantage of their time in dance halls to challenge conventional gender norms. They routinely passed certain men over for dances, refused escorts home, and embraced the sensual and physical side of dance to further accentuate their superior skills and ability on the dance floor. Most men felt threatened by women's displays of empowerment and took steps to thwart the changes taking place. Accustomed to street corners, poolrooms, saloons, and other all-maleget-togethers, working men tried to transform the dance hall into something that resembled these familiar hangouts.

McBee also finds that men frequently abandoned the commercial dance hall for their own clubs, set up in the basements of tenement flats. In these hangouts, working men established rules governing intimacy and leisure that allowed them to regulate the behavior of the women who attended club events. The collective manner in which they behaved not only affected the organization of commercial leisure but also men and women's struggles with and against one another to define the meaning of leisure, sexuality, intimacy, and even masculinity.

This book examines the formation of a globally oriented sports system in China, from the beginning of the reform process in 1978 to the present, focusing on the period after the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. It analyses how this system has shaped domestic social class identities and its role in international Chinese state politics. Despite advances in the marketization of the sports industry through previous eras, the Chinese state expanded investment in a set of global sports following the heavily government-directed drive towards national success at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games. This would be a time when the government focused on policies set to service a growing domestic middle-class and an increasingly wide-ranging set of international interests, with sporting investments being at the heart of their strategic plan. However, reform has proven difficult. The book presents a well-rounded account of this effort with tennis and soccer providing important case studies of the internal and external dynamics of this time. As such, the book will be of interest to researchers and students of globalization of sport, those studying East Asian sports development, and those who are interested in understanding China more broadly.

Is it possible for football matches or players to help forge a collective European identity? Pyta and Haverman seek to answer this question through a detailed analysis of how football is remembered across the continent. European Football and Collective Memory is the first book to deal with collective memory of football on a continental scale.

Sport can be a vehicle for the expression of identity, and also a factor in the shaping of identity. This book explores the complex interrelationships between nations, regions and states in the landscape of contemporary international sport, with a particular focus on identity. Exploring important themes such as the geopolitics of sports events, contested identities, and ownership of sport and its impact on sporting cultures, the book presents contemporary and historical cases from around the world, including football in a divided Ireland; sport and the anti-Apartheid movement; Chinese sporting nationalism and soft power; and the role of sport media in the shaping of Catalan identity. This is an important resource for students and researchers working in Sports Studies, Sports Journalism, Sports Management Studies, Sports Marketing, Football Studies, Sport and Identity Studies, Sociology of Sport Studies, and Cultural Studies.

This book examines the cultural, social, political, economic and aesthetic history of Sport in Europe. As sport has grown, progressively replacing religion, in its power to excite passion, provide emotional escape, offer fraternal (and increasingly sororital) bonding, it has become an inescapable reality linking public environment with intimate experience and thus offers the historian an opportunity to inspect and attempt to grasp all the dimensions of the recent past and their relative share in individual and collective experience. This collection considers the evolution of modern sport in Europe and examines its relationshop with politics, gender and class.

The most comprehensive survey of sport and sustainability ever published Addresses a topic of growing importance - every sport organisation needs to understand its environmental and social responsibilities Structured around the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, the gold standard blueprint for sustainable development Each section contains chapters on theory, measurement, and real-world application, making this an indispensable tool for students, researchers and practitioners International team of authors

In the Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland), as elsewhere, sport has been an assertion of individual and group identity, a demonstration of modernity, a source of personal, local and regional self-esteem, a symbol of confrontation and a preparation for war.
This volume is the first major work in the English language to bring together the research and reflections of scholars who have chosen to concentrate on the cultural impact of sport - the modern opium of the masses - in a Scandinavian setting. It explores the political, social and aesthetic impact of modern sport on Northern Europe, and the relationship between the Nordic nations and Nordic cultures, attitudes to the body and the evolution of specific Nordic visions of sport. The Nordic World shows why sport has played such an important part in both twentieth-century Nordic society and contemporary European culture.

This much needed book examines all of the major traditions of social thought to clearly show their influence in our understanding of sport and leisure.

In the Netherlands, girls and young women are increasingly active in women-only kickboxing. The general assumption, in the Netherlands and in western Europe more broadly, is that women's sport is a form of secular, feminist empowerment. Muslim women's participation would then exemplify the incongruence of Islam with the modern, secular nation-state. Punching Back provides a detailed ethnographic study that contests this view by showing that young Muslim women who kickbox establish agentive selves by playing with gender norms, challenging expectations, and living out their religious subjectivities.

With an international line-up of contributors, this book examines challenges to racism in and through sport. It addresses the different agents of change in the context of wider socio-political shifts and explores issues of policy formation, practices in sport and anti-racism in sport, and the challenge to sport today.

An examination of the relationship between sport and its cultural heritage. Sport is an integral part of British culture and an important aspect of modern life. Although its importance has been recognised by academic historians, sport has yet to be fully appreciated in the growing and related fields of heritage and museum studies. Sport and heritage have operated as seemingly separate spheres, yet together they can convey powerful messages; convergence between them is seen in the rise and popularity of sports museums, the collecting of sporting art and memorabilia, and popular concern over the demise of historic sports buildings and sport-related sites. These places, exhibitions and activities help to shape our understanding of sport, history and the past. The essays in this volume explore sports history as manifested in academic enquiry, museum exhibitions and heritage sites. They deal among other things with the public representation of sport and its significance; its impacton public spheres; the direction of sports heritage studies and their aims; the role of museums in public history; and place, memory and meaning in the historic sports landscape. Contributors: Jeffrey Hill, Jed Smith,Anthony Bateman, Ray Physick, Neil Skinner, Matthew Taylor, Tim O'Sullivan, Kevin Moore, Max Dunbar, Santiago De Pablo, John K. Walton, Wray Vamplew, Honor Godfrey, Jason Wood, Andrea Titterington, Stephen Done, Mike McGuinness, David Storey, Daphne Bolz, Jean Williams, Richard Holt Jeffrey Hill is Emeritus Professor of Historical and Cultural Studies, De Montfort University, Leicester; Kevin Moore is Director, National Football Museum, Manchester; Jason Wood is Director, Heritage Consultancy Services.

'A powerful argument, and practical advice, on the importance of reclaiming your leisure time to live a happier and more fulfilling life' Gretchen Rubin, New York Times bestselling author of Better Than Before and The Happiness Project Years ago Katrina Onstad was an au pair in France. Every Sunday, as best as she could tell, France shut down. No one worked; no one shopped for groceries, or did any kind of shopping. It felt like a ritual, sacred and culturally protected. Now, her weekends are more like a laundry list of to-do items dashed off between hockey training, doing actual laundry, checking emails, working on an assignment, and on and on. She began to do research to see if she was alone in feeling like weekends are almost non-existent anymore. As she dug further, she realized that this feeling was almost universal. Filled with rich research and stories, as well as her own struggles, Katrina takes us through the negative impact that losing our downtime has on all areas of our lives. She'll show us how some people and companies are already taking steps to eliminate the relentless 7-day-a-week availability that modern work life seems to require. Not anti-technology, rather this is about a return to the ritual of weekend.

This book offers a wealth of new views and interpretations of well-being in tourism, emphasizing the role that co-creation - the creation or enhancement of value through tourist engagement with tourism providers and other tourists - is increasingly playing in enriching tourist experiences. A combination of theoretical and empirically based contributions relating to various tourism contexts shed light on existing and potential contributions of tourists and destination providers to tourist well-being. Readers will find novel and compelling insights into both the very nature of wellbeing as perceived by the tourist and the opportunities that are emerging as tourists become savvy decision-makers capable of activating their own networks and resources in order to shape their experiences. The book will be of interest for all who wish to learn more about the character and the construction of well-being within tourism, the relationship of well-being to a range of factors, and the ways in which tourism operators can assist tourists in creating high-value experiences.

The chapters in the Women's Football in Latin America two volumes will look at the social and historical means of the embodied representation of gender differences that has been deeply embedded in the history of Latin American women and football. The authors identify and analyse how, in a range of ways, Latin American women have found in-between spaces, amid severe macho structures, to establish and play their football. As a result, the book will be of interest to researchers and students of sport sociology, football studies, gender studies, comparative sports studies, sports history, and Latin American sporting culture. The first volume of this edited collection brings together a variety of high-quality research investigating women's football in Brazil to an international, English readership. The complex issues surrounding women and sport have attracted the attention of Brazilian academics since the early 1980s, and this book seeks to update that scholarship to the modern day, with chapters on sports media, 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup, grassroots women's football, women's football fans. The book also indicates the forthcoming research and political challenges for gender equity in Brazilian football.

This book brings together essays analyzing the impact of sport and physical activity on psychophysical well-being and quality of life, through multidisciplinary and multi-country studies. It discusses how the commercial dimension of sport entertainment and recreational dimension of sport practice have been increasingly brought together in discussions on individual health and well-being, and social integration and participation. It therefore considers the relationship between sports practice, enjoyment of sporting events, sport participation and quality of life. The chapters examine various aspects of the practice of sport for professional and recreational purposes from the perspective of age, life course research, physical education in schools, government investment in sport activities across various stages of life, the rise of sports tourism as a global industry and how social networks and web apps are changing the perception of fitness. This innovative book is of interest to scholars and students of sport science, leisure studies, and well-being research.

This book highlights inconsistencies within the field of sports scholarship and provides an opportunity to open up and extend conversations about the intersection of sports media and race - particularly surrounding athletes of East Asian descent. Despite the growing influence of East Asian and Asian American/Canadian athletes, they are still underrepresented in Western media and in scholarship. This anthology adds much-needed literature to sports, popular culture, East Asian, and Asian American studies. The prominence of sports in global popular culture makes the intersections explored in this collection a crucial addition to existing conversations about both sports and East Asian/Asian American/Canadian studies.