ABSTRACT Although researchers belonging to disciplines like sports science, leisure studies and exercise psychology have conducted extensive studies on the critical engagement between sports and aging, there is still a scarcity of critical theorization of the interconnections between sports fiction and gerontological studies. It was only in the last decade that academic discourse on the latter arrested much scholarly attention, as critics gradually started to analyze representations of (old)age/master athletes within the ambit of sports fiction (mainly visual narratives). Aligning itself with this theoretical development, the paper tries to chart out the incremental growth of academic scholarship in sports and gerontology across the globe, and then, seeks to examine the Bollywood movie, Vijay 69, directed by Akshay Roy, in light of aging studies. The movie tells the story of an eponymous sexagenarian hero, enacted by Anupam Kher, who displays a unique spectacle of sportsmanship and athleticism, participating in a triathlon at the age of 69. The main purpose of the paper is to investigate how the movie captures the experience and conceptualization of old age, and also emerges as a counter narrative to the ageist perception that acts as the dominant force in the arena of sports.

ABSTRACT This paper situates leisure as a critical site for advancing digital justice. In the wake of Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter/X and its broader implications for digital governance, we examine how infrastructures of data and design reproduce colonial, racialized, gendered, and heteronormative hierarchies. Bridging leisure studies, digital platforming, and social justice scholarship, we advance three interrelated interventions: algorithmic heteronormativity, which reveals how platforms encode normative intimacies; appnography, a justice-oriented methodology for tracing power in digital environments; and digital praxis, which translates critique into participatory, co-designed action. Through the Collaboratory on Digital Equity and Research (CODER), we demonstrate how projects such as Digital Shorts and the Safety Map mobilize research towards equitable, accountable, and inclusive digital spaces. We argue that design is governance and that leisure scholarship must engage platform architectures as infrastructures for justice and worldmaking.

Despite recreation therapy’s commitment to person-centered care, current assessment practices operate within conventional boundaries that may limit recognition of clients' authentic leisure interests. This conceptual analysis addresses how therapist bias could systematically filter client leisure identities during assessment, potentially creating barriers to culturally responsive interventions and perpetuating health disparities. The proposed framework aligns with whole person health principles that address interconnected biological, behavioral, social, and environmental factors influencing health outcomes, recognizing that authentic wellness emerges from individuals' capacity to express complete identities rather than treating isolated symptoms. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework illuminating how practitioner filtering mechanisms operate and propose systematic approaches for inclusive assessment environments. Through theoretical analysis integrating stigma research, cultural competency literature, and leisure studies scholarship, this study develops the Bias-Aware Assessment Framework (BAAF). The framework synthesizes the Assessment Paradox—the tension between person-centered ideals and institutional realities. The Bias-Aware Assessment Framework (BAAF) model identifies four interconnected layers influencing assessment outcomes: societal context, institutional filters, therapist lens, and client experience. It reveals how practitioners' cultural assumptions and personal perspectives create systemic gaps between clients' actual leisure identities and activities deemed appropriate within therapeutic frameworks. The BAAF provides practical guidance through bias recognition strategies, cultural humility approaches, and client-centered exploration techniques. Long-term implications include transforming professional education, supervision practices, and organizational policies. The field stands at a critical juncture where person-centered care commitments must evolve beyond theoretical ideals toward systematic bias-aware practices advancing health equity through authentic recognition of diverse leisure identities.

This paper addresses the systematic exclusion of Anna Julia Cooper’s foundational Black feminist thought from the sociological and leisure studies canon. Despite her 1892 work, A Voice from the South, pioneering intersectional analysis and standpoint theory decades before these concepts entered mainstream academia, Cooper remains marginalized. The discipline’s canon was deliberately constructed around white, male, Eurocentric thinkers, creating an epistemic hierarchy that devalued other knowledge forms through self-reinforcing citation networks, biased publishing, and segregated curricula. By conducting a deep reading of Cooper’s text, this study demonstrates how her theoretical framework, centered on education as liberatory leisure, a critique of racial capitalism’s theft of time, and a spatial analysis of segregation, provides essential tools for reimagining leisure studies.

IntroductionAs a traditional martial art, Taekwondo’s modern identity as a leisure activity for adults is increasingly contested, particularly in its country of origin. This study investigates this phenomenon by examining the motivational structure that underpins adult participation.MethodsFocusing on the relationships between participation motivation, leisure satisfaction, and continuance intention, data from 233 adult practitioners in South Korea, consisting primarily of young male students, were analysed using a structural equation model (SEM).ResultsThe findings reveal a significant shift in leisure values. It is observed that traditional motivations such as ‘self-development’ and ‘family’ orientation were excluded during the measurement validation phase, which may indicate a reweighting of motivational structures or potential measurement adequacy issues within this specific cohort. Instead, while health and social motivations remain relevant, entertainment orientation emerges as the primary driver for both satisfaction and continued participation.DiscussionThis result challenges the conventional understanding of discipline-focused activities within leisure studies, suggesting that the pursuit of fun and enjoyment is becoming a central tenet even in traditional practices. The findings suggest the possibility that prioritizing experiential and hedonic aspects may be necessary to ensure the sustained relevance of such activities among specific demographics, such as young adult practitioners.

Abstract This paper is an autoethnographic study of the author’s companionship with a retired farm dog in regional Australia. The study has a qualitative approach and was informed by a conceptual model of information experiences of multispecies households borrowed from the information science discipline as its theoretical framework. The first part of the findings includes an overall picture of the information-seeking and information-sharing experiences related to training, healthcare, nutrition, and environmental issues. The second section relates to all types of the required and shared information on emotional, social, and recreational aspects. This study demonstrates that companion animals have agency and play a mutual role in shaping the lived experiences of their caretakers. The paper contributes to the scholarship on the informational experiences of the responsible companion animal guardianship and deepens our understanding of the complex dynamics of multispecies families across various disciplines, from information science to leisure studies.

ABSTRACT As a form of domination, colonialism lasted (or lasts) based on a range of formal structures within the colony and in the empire. But in the seat of empire, to justify the redirection of resources, extract labour for colonial service and build a public consciousness in support of empire, forms of entertainment and education were key. Children’s books, novels and, for this proposed manuscript, board games. Through archival research, the first edition of Deutschland’s Kolonien-Spiel (1890), one can peer into the cultivation of a colonial mindset (young gamers) by colonial architects (senior architects), as by the latter half of the 1800s, Germany had “acquired” territory in Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands. The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 did not result in the broader aims (and needs) of Germany; there was a financial crisis that the colonies were to play a crucial part in solving. Dice rolls led to figurines moving across borders and through territories. Dice rolling led to historical and geopolitical awareness while understanding the inferiority of the depicted colonized. The first player to reach China wins and accumulates all of the marks. This is the pedagogy of colonialism.

ABSTRACT This study argues that sporting autobiographies shaped by market incentives and stakeholder expectations reproduce neoliberal ideals that normalise meritocracy and individual responsibility. In practice, sport reflects these values through competition, disciplinary regimes and individual struggles. These books are conventionally authored by high-profile athletes who sell hope, instructions and individualised logic. Against this backdrop, this research uncovers how the autobiographies of Josh Sundquist, Lance Armstrong and Yuvraj Singh in Just Don’t Fall (2010), It’s Not About the Bike (2001) and The Test of My Life (2013), respectively, convert private resilience into marketable pedagogy and philanthropic legitimacy. It employs symptomatic reading and auto/biographical method and uses a neoliberal lens as a theoretical framework to identify three themes across the corpus: (1) early talent identification as an origin myth; (2) masochistic discipline and healthism; and (3) conversion of moral authority into branded philanthropy. These narratives normalise selection, aestheticise bodily risk, privatise care and shift public responsibilities onto private actors. Ethically, such narratives legitimise market-based remedies over systemic reform by shaping public understanding of merit and blame. The study concludes that treating sporting autobiographies as serious literary and leisure studies material is essential to displace the hagiographic, neoliberal framing currently dominating athlete autobiographies.

This essay introduces the special issue theme (leisure in extremis), mode (a Festschrift), honoree Karl Spracklen, and (lastly) the essays that comprise this volume. A Festschrift is a publication that honors an academic, presented during their lifetime, with contributions from the honoree’s colleagues, friends and former students. We consider Karl’s work and leisure studies as a “worthwhile” pursuit that is theory-driven, meaningful within people’s lives and professions, and operating at the edges of the field at a critical time. The nine essays span Karl’s oeuvre, from extreme music cultures, to ‘northernness’, subcultures, social justice, real ale and whisky tourism, goth and dark leisure, sporting masculinities, rugby leagues, and events. The contributors engage with a ‘paradox of leisure’ characterized by freedom but also instrumental control, ‘communicative’ expression but also commodification, resistance and alternativity but also the erosion of its meaning and purpose. Throughout, we celebrate Karl’s work on leisure, in extremis.

This essay offers a critical reading of Karl Spracklen’s scholarship on goth and ‘dark’ leisure, situating his work within the broader sociology of post‑punk, metal and alternative music cultures. Drawing on The Evolution of Goth Culture and related articles, the essay argues that Spracklen has repositioned goth from a marginal music subculture into a central site for analyzing leisure, identity and power in late‑modern Britain. Through the concepts of communicative alternativity, dark leisure and eventisation, grounded in Habermas, Bourdieu, Hall and Hebdige, Spracklen frames goth, metal and post‑punk as fields where participants negotiate stigma, pleasure and cultural capital under ­conditions of commodification, urban regeneration and neoliberal ‘eventisation’. The essay also traces how Spracklen’s supervision of scene‑based researchers has extended the radical, working‑class history of Leeds Polytechnic into a contemporary scholarship that normalizes the study of dark leisure while preserving its oppositional and emancipatory potential.

Guest editorial: The visual turn in tourism, hospitality and leisure studies

Theorizing is the context of discovery where new ideas are generated with the purpose of developing a better understanding of a social phenomenon. The context of justification follows and is the process of illustration, dissemination, and defense of the insights garnered through the discovery and data collection phases. While theory is commonly invoked in manuscripts in the field of leisure studies, the claim put forth in this critical essay is that the process of theorizing does not occur in tandem, resulting in a gap between the intellectual investigation and the conclusions drawn by authors. While this critical essay challenges the field and its scholars to embark on the multiphase process of theorizing as outlined, this is not intended to be an indictment of any individual researcher, simply a call-to-action to improve scholarship and the refinement of explanations of social phenomena that may have some degree of transferability and lend to the improvement of practical problems in society.

ABSTRACT There is a paucity of research in the field of leisure studies on the reasons for, and outcomes associated with, recreation programme discontinuation or closure. Recreation programmes cease operation all the time, and often it is due to insufficient funding or staffing. However, without a systematic documentation of the lifespan of those programmes and the ramifications of programme cessation on participants, we will continue to only have an incomplete understanding of the broader value of recreation services. Thus, it is imperative to investigate the problems that may lead to the discontinuation of a recreation programme, as well as the holes they leave in their absence. Additionally, this research note simultaneously explores the role of burnout in key providers of those recreation programmes, seeking to provide an illustrative example of the arc of creation through discontinuation of a hiking programme for cancer survivors, and the role that inadequate support resources have on that ultimate decision. Bridging these two parallel concerns adds greater depth to the problem of recreation programme closures.

Existentialism has been described as a philosophy, a school of thought, a social movement, and none of the above. For some, it is too malleable to be compartmentalized, too diverse to be ascribed core tenets. Equally so, existentialism, or perhaps more specifically, references to a person as an ‘existentialist’ or regarding the plight of an ‘existential’ condition, have become passé or trite monikers, mindsets, or descriptors, so overused that they have lost their conceptual value or intellectual weight. Misuses and misattributions aside, existentialism as an approach to life has a lot to offer the pursuit of leisure, but also the field of leisure studies itself. In this short essay, I work through some of the cornerstone principles to highlight the essential properties of an existentialist worldview and its relevance to leisure.

While The Great Replacement Theory (GRT) has been relegated in intellectual spaces as merely a conspiracy theory, there are scant sources that have treated the theory with respectful scrutiny and discussion. This is particularly relevant as much of Camus’ articulations were founded on past scholarship within White Nationalism and White Separatism as well as Camus (2011) articulations have taken tangible root in societies across the globe. This article presents GRT as a true theory explains social phenomenon from the perspectives of its adherents, actors, and students, with clear factors (increased non-White presence) and conditions (the disappearance of White presence). The relevance to leisure studies? Any consideration of seriously studying racism or White Supremacy requires an understanding of how those who most enact that phenomenon, as what lies ahead. It just so happens that parks and other public spaces that have been most used and targeted by those espouse this theory.

ABSTRACT This study aims to construct a new paradigm for leisure research based on Agent-Based Modelling (ABM), in response to the limitations of traditional positivist and interpretivist approaches in explaining complex, dynamic leisure behaviours and emergent social processes. It systematically reviews the epistemological foundations and methodological characteristics of ABM and demonstrates its suitability and application logic in relation to research questions in leisure studies. An exemplar model is then presented to illustrate the model-building process and the specification of core mechanisms in leisure-related ABM. Furthermore, this paper proposes a modelling framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with Point of Interest (POI) data to enhance the rationality of behavioural rule specification and spatial environment representation. The study shows that ABM can capture individual heterogeneity, local interaction processes, and the emergence of macroscopic leisure phenomena within a unified framework, thereby facilitating a shift in leisure research from static correlation analysis to mechanism-oriented dynamic simulation. The contribution of this paper lies in providing a reusable framework for generating leisure behaviours, validating the feasibility of applying ABM to leisure research, and offering a modelling reference for future data-driven ABM studies in leisure contexts.

Access to front-country camping on North American public lands has historically been preferential to those who are White, relatively wealthy, and highly educated. In theory, however, everyone has equal right to enjoy the benefits from camping on public lands. As an extension of traditional leisure constraints theory, this study presents a unique quantitative application of access theory—dominantly used in political ecology—to examine who has access to camping and what enables camping access in the rural, American West. Results suggest that among six identified camping pathways, technology and knowledge are the most enabling while social identity is the least enabling. These pathways varied for older campers who reported greater access overall compared to younger campers. Results also indicate that campsite rationing decisions may mediate access with first-come first-served systems facilitating greater access compared to reservation-based systems. These findings highlight the promise of incorporating access theory into future outdoor recreation leisure studies.

ABSTRACT Objective This research evaluates the Polish version of the Family Leisure Satisfaction Scale's (FLSS) psychometric properties and its alignment with the original scale's single‐factor structure. Background The FLSS was used to measure the degree of satisfaction that family members derive from their leisure activities together. This work extends prior research, the first stage of which involved the Polish cultural adaptation of the Family Leisure Activity Profile questionnaire. Method The scale structure was subjected to confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). CFA demonstrated a good fit of the model to the data based on a sample of 494 Polish individuals from 247 families, including parents and children (aged 11–16 years). Results All fit indicators were satisfactory, allowing the two models to fit the data very well: comparative fit index (CFI) = .93 to .94 (Model 1) and CFI = .92 to .95 (Model 2); Tucker–Lewis index (TLI) = .91 to .92 (Model 1) and TLI = .91 to .93 (Model 2); standardized root mean squared residual (SRMR) = .063 to .069 (Model 1) and SRMR = .062 to .070 (Model 2); root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = .077 to .82 (Model 1) and RMSEA = .072 to .077 (Model 2). The results show a high level of internal consistency: Cronbach's α = .92 to .93, intraclass correlation coefficient (2 k) = .91 to .94. Conclusion The results confirm that the scale retains its original single‐factor structure, which is essential for its applicability to different cultural settings. Implications By confirming the scale's validity and reliability, this research contributes to the broader field of family leisure studies in Poland and supports initiatives to enhance family cohesion through shared activities. It will probably be used as a basis for future international studies of family assessment tools.

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a claustropolitan sociology of leisure that seeks to explain how the acceleration of digital technologies reshapes both the experience and the significance of leisure in a post-pandemic context. Drawing on Steve Redhead’s later scholarship and Paul Virilio’s theorisation of speed, collapse, and technological risk, it argues that contemporary leisure is increasingly characterised by foreclosure – a narrowing of possibilities driven by predictive logics embedded in digital systems. The concept of claustropolitanism is presented as the condition of the ‘locked citizen’, whose leisure environments are governed by commercial digital platforms and bandit algorithms that anticipate, record, and commodify cultural participation. This paper, then, offers both an evolution of cosmopolitan and postmodern approaches to leisure and also a critique of their limits. Finally, it concludes that leisure studies must now grapple with and from inside the claustropolitan condition as the defining feature of a hyper-connected world.

The academic field of leisure studies has been in a perilous position for the last few decades with the continued loss of programs and departments across the nation. Many have mused on issues facing the field for decades, including fragmentation, lack of a collective identity, financial and enrollment challenges, and a perceived lack, or loss, of relevance. At a certain point, there will no longer be a “field” of leisure studies, even if a few otherwise robust programs and departments persist into the future. This critical commentary calls that concern to task so that what is left of the field can create a dialog regarding this likely outcome and plan for the future.