Leisure Studies has a long tradition of examining relationships between leisure, culture and wellbeing. Recently, wellbeing has become a focus for wider academic, policy and practice communities. Despite the contemporary policy landscape and research on leisure and wellbeing, the accumulated understanding of interconnected and complementary work remains under developed. The conclusions we reach about the impact of leisure, about who is doing well, and who is impacted negatively, how and to what extent, depend on our understandings of the relationships between various leisure cultures and wellbeing. We invite you to submit to this special issue that aims to provide an interdisciplinary and world-wide opportunity for critical, theoretical, and methodological analyses concerned with leisure cultures and wellbeing.Aligned with complex debates surrounding wellbeing, the focus of the special issue is to develop understanding of subjective wellbeing (SWB) within the leisure sphere. SWB describes wellbeing in terms of a range of feelings arising from what people do and how they think and feel. Positive feelings arising from leisure practices include happiness, joy, contentment and excitement as well as those with negative effect: sadness, worry, stress, and anxiety. People’s experiences also involve a sense of purpose (e.g. worthwhileness, meaningfulness) and pointlessness (e.g., futility, boredom). A key objective of this Special Issue is to convey knowledge of the complexities of subjective wellbeing. Moreover, the issue seeks to make visible rigorous high quality social science research, informed by innovative methods that build knowledge of the diverse relationships between leisure cultures and wellbeing.
Potential themes include but are not limited to:
- Conceptualising wellbeing in leisure studies
- Methodological debate about subjective wellbeing for leisure studies
- Leisure, wellbeing and mental health
- Wellbeing inequalities and leisure cultures
- Wellbeing, disability and leisure
- Arts, creative practice and wellbeing
- ‘Greenspace’, ‘bluespace’ and environmental understandings of leisure and wellbeing
- Music, singing, the emotions and wellbeing
- Sport, physical activity and meaningful involvement
- Sensory and performative approaches to wellbeing
- Understanding difference and diversity and wellbeing
- Gendered understandings of leisure and wellbeing in everyday life
- Leisure cultures, ethnicities and wellbeing
- Leisure and the pursuit of happiness
Submission Details
The deadline for manuscripts to be submitted is 30 June 2018. A typical Manuscript for this journal should be 7,000-8,000 words; this limit includes tables, references, figure captions, footnotes, endnotes. A typical Research Note for this journal should be 4,000-5,000 words.
For further details, please visit the journal’s Instructions for Authors page.
Timeline
- Call for papers: 1 September 2017
- Submission deadline: 30 June 2018
- Review process Manuscripts returned to authors: 31 October 2018
- Revision process Final drafts: 31 December 2018
We look forward to receiving your manuscript!
For inquiries and/or further information regarding the special issue, please contact the guest editors:
- Guest Editor: Louise Mansfield, Brunel University, UK
- Guest Editor: Norma Daykin, University of Winchester, UK
- Guest Editor: Tess Kay, Brunel University, UK
