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Call for Papers | Creative and Connected Communities of/in/with Leisure: Theoretical and Methodological Advances | LSA Conference 2026, Brunel University of London, June 30 – July 3, 2026. Call ends January 31, 2026

October 27, 2025

Blue leisure. (Shutterstock/Nataliya Dmytrenko)

In an era marked by rapid social change, digital connectivity, evolving cultural identities, and poly-crises, leisure has emerged as a dynamic site of creativity, community-building, and resistance. As leisure practices increasingly intersect with digital technologies, cultural production, and social transformation, there is a pressing need to refine the theoretical and methodological tools we use to study them. The 2026 annual conference of the Leisure Studies Association invites scholars, practitioners, and cultural producers to explore how leisure practices—both traditional and emergent—shape and are shaped by creative and connected communities. The conference aims to foster dialogue across disciplines, challenge conventional boundaries, and illuminate the diverse ways leisure is experienced, imagined and enacted within creative and connected communities. We invite abstract submissions for scholarly work that critically engages with the conceptual frameworks and research strategies shaping the study of created and connected communities of/in/with leisure.

Submissions may address (but are not limited to) the following areas:

- - Creative Communities: Art-based leisure, maker cultures, performance, storytelling, and collective creativity
  - Connected Leisure: Social media, gaming, virtual worlds, and digitally mediated leisure practices
  - Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Leisure: Leisure in urban/rural settings, placemaking, rhythms of rest and play
  - Leisure and Social Justice: Inclusion, accessibility, resistance, and the politics of leisure
  - Leisure, Communities and Identity: Gender, race, class, disability, and intersectional perspectives
  - Spaces and Places of Leisure: Green, blue and grey leisure, urban spaces, rurality and leisure, formal and informal gatherings for leisure
  - Leisure, Health and Wellbeing: Mental health, creative and community in play, rest, and therapeutic practices
  - Disconnected Leisure – Creativity and Community as Resistance: Activism, countercultures, and alternative economies
  - Alternative theme: Please suggest a theme for the conference if your research does not fit into the themes outlined above

Submission Guidelines

We welcome abstracts of up to 300 words, accompanied by a short bio (max 150 words). Submissions should clearly articulate the research question, theoretical orientation, methodology, findings and relevance to the conference theme.
We encourage proposals for: