Young peoples everyday lives and leisure practices coalesce around digital cultures—social media, web 2.0, youtube, wearable technologies, health and fitness apps and so on. Indeed, young people are no longer considered as ‘just’ consumers or readers of leisure but as active producers/auteurs (prosumers) through opportunities brought about by social media platforms such as facebook, twitter and other emerging technologies.
This special issue will build on the observation that many of the current discussions about young people’s leisure should be informed by what is taking place in and through emerging technologies as these (virtual) environments present a crucial context where traditional, categorical assumptions about the body, identity and leisure may be contested. Far from being ‘virtual’, the body is constituted within and through emerging technologies in material ways. Recent ‘moral panics’ over the role of digital cultures in teen suicide, digital drinking games (such as neknomination), an endless array of homoerotic images of young male and female bodies (often, but not exclusively, commercially inspired) being linked with steroid use, disordered eating and body dissatisfaction, facebook games / fundraising campaigns (e.g. for breast cancer), blogs devoted to exposing ‘everyday sexism’, twitter abuse (of feminists, of athletes, of racist nature to name but a few), speak to the need for critical engagement with digital worlds. While some of the earlier techno-utopian visions offered the promise of digitality to give rise to participatory, user generator collaborations, this special issue will be encourage articles that take a critical approach to analyzing digital technologies and leisure cultures.
Potential contributions could focus on the following themes:
- Digital cultures & risk
- Affect & digital cultures
- Sexual Embodiment, sexualisation and digital cultures
- Leisure and posthumanism
- Health, the body & digital cultures
- Cultural body politics & digital cultures
- Disability, disfigurement & digital cultures
- Young people as digital culture prosumption
- Digital cultures & public / private lives
- Digital cultures & national mega-events
- Cyborgification, prostethicisation and leisure
- (Urban) Space, Leisure & digital cultures
- Medicine, public health & digital cultures
- Digital cultures, parenting cultures and childhood
- Digital cultures & food
- Digital cultures & pleasure
- Digital cultures & obesity politics
- Digital Cultures, Digital Natives /Victims
- (Bio-)Pedagogies & Digital cultures
- Digital cultures & body image
- The digitization of children
- (Sexual violence) & digital cultures
- Digital cultures & innovative methodologies
Submission Instructions
For information on how to submit your paper, please see the ‘Submission Guidelines for Authors‘ used for every issue of Leisure Studies
Deadline for submission of papers: 19th Decmeber 2014
Planned Publication Date: Volume 35, Number 1 (2016)
Editorial information
- Guest Editor: Michael Silk, University of Bath
- Guest Editor: Emma Rich, University of Bath
- Guest Editor: Anthony Bush, University of Bath
- Guest Editor: Brad Millington, University of Bath
