Pump tracks are among the fastest-growing recreation infrastructure in North America. Within the leisure community, pump tracks are increasingly framed as inclusive public spaces for all ages, skill levels, and all wheeled equipment. However, inclusion in urban leisure spaces in what is now known as Canada must be understood within the context of the country’s colonial history, which has typically erased Indigenous Peoples. In this paper, the authors (leisure researchers and Indigenous community members) explore Indigenous Peoples’ relationship(s) to the pump tracks at the Steve Smith Bike Park located on Snuneymuxw First Nation ancestral and unceded lands, in what is now Nanaimo, British Columbia. Using settler colonial theory, community-based participatory research, go-along and semi-structured interviews, and reflexive thematic analysis, we produced two themes: (1) enduring colonial legacies at the pump tracks; (2) the pump tracks as a space for resistance and cultural resurgence. Together, these themes illustrate how the pump tracks function as complex urban leisure spaces that both (re)produce settler colonial exclusions and enable Indigenous presence, resistance, and resurgence.

Given the popularity of angling as a leisure activity in coastal countries, this study examined how different dimensions of anglers’ activity involvement (attraction, centrality, and self-expression) affect psychological ownership and influence information-sharing behavior. Data were collected from 424 active anglers at the Northern Breakwater of the Taichung Port Sea Fishing Demonstration Area in Taiwan using systematic sampling. The findings reveal that the three dimensions of activity involvement activate different motivational pathways toward information-sharing behavior: attraction operates primarily through direct enjoyment-driven sharing; centrality functions exclusively through psychological ownership; and self-expression operates through both direct and ownership-mediated routes. These findings are most applicable to regulated, place-based recreational fishing settings, offering managers actionable insights on channeling anglers’ general willingness to share toward governance-relevant content.

This study provides the first quantitative empirical examination of living funerals—pre-mortem farewell ceremonies—as a leisure phenomenon within a collectivist cultural context. Grounded in theories of rites of passage, liminality and communitas, interaction ritual chains, and festivity, a cross-sectional survey (N = 165) of Taiwanese adults identified a culturally contextualized three-factor structure—Family Companionship, Life Planning, and Ritual Atmosphere—through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Structural equation modeling revealed that familial support indirectly enhances participation willingness through ritual atmosphere and life planning, consistent with Collins’ emotional energy mechanism. Cardiovascular disease (OR = 12.301) and regional cultural norms (OR = 2.969) were the strongest predictors; demographic variables were non-significant. The study positions living funerals as a hybrid liminal-leisure practice, bridges leisure studies and palliative care, and advances the emergent scholarship on leisure, loss, and death. Elevated RMSEA (0.097–0.098) underscores the need for cross-cultural validation and longitudinal extension.

This essay reflects on everyday leisure as a negotiated practice within commercialized urban parks. It explores how publicness is not fixed but continuously assembled through ordinary acts of use, adaptation, and exchange. Rather than viewing public space as either open or enclosed, the essay argues that leisure should be understood as an ongoing negotiation in which meaning and access are co-produced through everyday practice.

The concept of experience has a contested status in leisure studies. Much of the controversy over experience concerns whether the deployment of experience design techniques and philosophies helps or hinders leisure studies and the provision of leisure services. The intent of this inquiry is to recast the role of experience in both the study and practice of leisure. Rather than debating the merits and demerits of experience design methods and values, I will argue that experience itself is fundamental to both understanding leisure and living a good leisure life. Aristotle’s distinction between three types of virtuous knowledge (episteme, techne, and phronesis) that correspond to three ways of life (theoria, poiesis, and praxis) provides the foundation for a more expansive understanding of the role experience should play in leisure studies and services.

Beginning from a Romani standpoint, this article challenges the assumption within Leisure Studies that leisure is a neutral and universally accessible good. Drawing on Critical Romani Studies and Black Radical Thought, it argues that dominant leisure frameworks reproduce epistemic violence by treating racialized and marginalized communities as deficient participants rather than producers of alternative social worlds. In response, the article develops the concept of boundary leisure: fugitive practices through which marginalized groups reclaim time, space, and collective presence under racial capitalism. Using the Scandinavian trasmatta (rag rug) as a heuristic, boundary leisure is theorized as the weaving of fragmented lives into protective zones of solidarity and survival. Analyses of Romani cultural interventions, the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program, and The Nap Ministry demonstrate how boundary leisure operates through refusal, opacity, care, and world-making. The article concludes by advocating relational and participatory approaches to studying leisure beyond extractive models of observation.

What does it reveal about the perceived disposability of fat bodies that scholarship readily attends to fat mortality, yet seldom illuminates fat joy or liberation through leisure? Grounded in the understanding that leisure is fundamentally about liberation, freedom, and bodily autonomy, we take up this question by exploring the philosophical foundations of fat liberation. We position our work in dialogue with fat activism, fat studies, feminist theory, movement ecology, and critical leisure studies. Recognizing fatness as a social and political identity, we argue that fat leisure is a crucial site for personal transformation—which is foundational for building the collective capacity needed to create alternatives and challenge dominant institutions. In other words, fostering one’s own agency is essential preparation for engaging in broader collective struggle. Thus, we align with Davidson and Gruver (2022) framing of fat activism as public philosophy—an approach that invites scholars and practitioners to engage broader discourse to transform material conditions through practices that shift social norms, make fat liberation tangible, and contest systems of exclusion. As scholars, we illustrate our engagement in fat leisure as a component of public philosophy by tracing how our Big & Bold Paddle program, an adaptive, nature-based aquatic initiative, aims to cultivate body autonomy and belonging for people in larger bodies.

This study explores the role of leisure satisfaction as a potential moderator in the relationship between feelings of loneliness and subjective wellbeing among older adults. Data were drawn from a survey of a stratified random sample of residents living in a southwestern region of Ontario, Canada, during the fall of 2022, and focused on respondents who are 65 years of age and older (n = 1,391). Results of moderation analyses suggest that leisure satisfaction significantly mitigates the negative association between feelings of loneliness and life satisfaction. Additionally, the interaction of leisure satisfaction and marital status exhibits a combined moderating effect on the loneliness and life satisfaction association. The findings advance our understanding of the perceived benefits of leisure in the theoretical framework concerning loneliness and subjective wellbeing and emphasize the importance of addressing the heterogeneity of the elderly population. Implications and future study directions are discussed accordingly.

This study contributes to the leisure studies literature in two main ways: through providing a better understanding of the meaning of leisure (specifically, sport participation) for people with intellectual disability; and through testing the value of a re-envisioned concept of serious leisure developed by Gallant et al. as an analytic framework. In this UK-based study, Special Olympics involvement as a serious leisure experience for athletes, their family members, coaches, support people and volunteers is investigated. Findings show a strong commitment by all actors, an experience that is substantial, interesting and fulfilling, a unique athlete identity, and a range of outcomes for individuals, the Special Olympics world, and the wider community. Using Gallant et al’s conceptualization of serious leisure enabled the complexity and rich texture of the Special Olympics experience to be revealed, situated in relation to its socio-political context and foregrounding social and community processes.

Leisure is routinely imagined as a domain of freedom, restoration, self-expression, and authenticity. This paper argues that such promises operate as fantasy structures that organize desire and enjoyment. Drawing on Lacan’s account of the split subject, fantasy, objet petit a, jouissance, and the Real, it examines post-digital leisure apparatuses as arrangements that turn anticipation, attainment, deflation, and renewed pursuit into a repeatable circuit. Through readings of TikTok, Peloton, Disney, and revenge travel, the paper shows how leisure makes fantasy operational through interfaces, metrics, rankings, itineraries, and experience designs. It also develops “fantasy literacy” as an orientation for analyzing and discussing leisure promise-structures, linking everyday disappointment to the social forms that keep enjoyment moving.