Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

165

Let’s Talk about Who We Are: Envisioning Reflexive Global Leisure Scholarship

RC13 Sociology of Leisure (host committee)

Language: English

In this rapidly globalizing (academic) world, we are having more opportunities for cross-cultural leisure studies, international collaborations, publications in different languages, and the use of knowledge from different countries in both research and practice. However, if we use terms and concepts uncritically, we may not only cause miscommunications, but also produce problematic knowledge and reproduce power imbalance in global leisure scholarship (e.g. Iwasaki, Nishino, Onda and Bowling, 2007; Roberts, 2010; Samdahl, 2010). 
To avoid such consequences and rather promote better-balanced scholarship in the world, this session calls for papers that initiate reflexive dialogues about (a)who we are as (leisure) scholars and (b) how and why we do leisure research.
Reflexivity refers to our critical awareness of influences of our personal and cultural backgrounds on our knowledge construction and use processes. Given various ways of doing leisure studies around the world, our practices (e.g. methods), institutions (e.g. university systems, relevant policies, granting agencies, peer review systems), and bodies of knowledge (e.g. theories, literature) should be subject to our reflexive and critical examination.
With this concept as an overall topic, this session invites a broad spectrum of papers from all over the world (i.e. both West and non-West) in various formats including empirical studies, philosophical and theoretical essays, review-type articles, and methodological works among others. Moreover, this session awaits voices not only from experienced researchers who have already been involved in this globalizing leisure scholarship, but also from young scholars who bear the future of this academic enterprise. Posters: