Special Issue Editors
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- Nicola De Martini Ugolotti, Bournemouth University, United Kingdom & Associazione Frantz Fanon, Italy
ndemartiniugolotti@bournemouth.ac.uk - Robyn Smith, Loughborough University, United Kingdom
R.Smith10@lboro.ac.uk - Sepandarmaz Mashreghi, Malmö University, Sweden
sepandarmaz.mashreghi@mau.se - Shemine Gulamhusein, University of Victoria, Canada
shemineg@uvic.ca - Aarti Ratna, Northumbria University, United Kingdom
aarti.ratna@northumbria.ac.uk
- Nicola De Martini Ugolotti, Bournemouth University, United Kingdom & Associazione Frantz Fanon, Italy

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. (Benjamin, 1968/1955, 79)
This special issue aims to explore how we can multiply interdisciplinary leisure perspectives by taking the borders, borderlands and crossings that traverse unequal global geographies as starting points for theorisation and praxis.
Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s quote, this special issue “keeps with the insight” that borders, borderlands and crossings are not the rough edges of nation-states, cities and “modernity” itself, but their constitutive elements (Anzaldua, 2012/1987; Mbembe, 2019), thus shifting the starting points for leisure conceptualisations and research methodologies in unfolding planetary scenarios.
From this perspective, we consider the productivity of considering borders, borderlands and crossings as key-words to articulate how leisure relates to the “oppression, discrimination, violence, death” (Fox & Riches, 2014, 238) that constitute old and new social and political relations while also being part the “ongoing work of salvaging imperilled humanity from the mounting wreckage” (Gilroy, 2018, 20).
By addressing what leisure domains say and do, do and make throughout the borders, borderlands and crossings that traverse unequal global geographies of power, this special issue aims to connect/bring together issues that tend to be addressed as separated in and beyond interdisciplinary leisure studies (leisure and forced migration, Indigenous knowledges and sovereignties, disability, intersecting urban exclusions, settler colonialism, climate change).
In doing so, we want to build on and expand works that highlighted the connections across Indigenous Knowledges and migrant perspectives in negotiating Western-centric knowledge/power/land relations (Salih et al., 2021; Gross et al., 2023), addressed leisure as revealing devastation and possibility among dehumanisation and necropolitical violence (Kipnis, 2022; De Martini Ugolotti, 2024), and examined issues of ethics, voice and praxis in participatory leisure research in contexts of systemic inequality (Smith et al., 2023).
In line with these aims, we welcome work across multiple disciplinary perspectives, including sociology, anthropology, cultural geography, gender studies, queer studies, migration studies, and the humanities. We particularly invite contributions from global majority voices/contexts, early career researchers, and community activists/organizers including but not limited to the following themes/topics:
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- Everyday leisure in/through/across borderlands.
- Leisure, displacements and disablements.
- Queering leisure and (forced) migration.
- Leisure, (forced) migration and settler colonialism.
- Participatory leisure research across borders and borderlands.
- Leisure affects and embodiment(s) beyond Western-centric genealogies.
- Leisure and the question of the (post)human: convergences/divergences between crip, de-colonial, Indigenous and more-than-human leisure perspectives.
- What is the purpose and what are the potentialities of Leisure Studies amidst Genocide, Ecocide, Urbicide?
References
Anzaldúa, G. (2012 [1987]) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th edition, Aunt Lute Books.
Benjamin, W. 1968 (1955). Angelus Novus/Theses on the Philosophy of History. Schocken Books.
De Martini Ugolotti, N. (2024). Music, Forced Migration and Emplacement: Sounds of Asylum Bristol. Palgrave McMillan.
Fox, K., & Riches, G. (2014). Intersecting rhythms: The spatial production of local Canadian heavy metal and urban aboriginal hip hop in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. In B. D. Lashua, K. Spracklen, & S. Wagg (Eds.), Sounds and the City: Popular music, place and globalization (pp. 225–240). Palgrave Macmillan.
Gilroy, P. (2018). “Where every breeze speaks of courage and liberty”: Offshore humanism and marine xenology, or racism and the problem of critique at sea level. Antipode, 50, 3–22.
Gross, L., Mashreghi, S., & Söderman, E. (2023). Refusal – opening otherwise forms of research. Fennia, 201(2).
Kipnis, H. (2022) We exist, play sports, and will persist: everyday lives of Palestinian sportswomen through the lens of the ‘politics of invisibility’, Sport in Society, 25(3), 566-581.
Mbembe, A. (2019). Bodies as Borders. From the European South, 4, 5-18.
Salih, R., Zambelli, E., & Welchman, L. (2020). “From Standing Rock to Palestine we are United”: diaspora politics, decolonization and the intersectionality of struggles. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(7), 1135–1153.
Smith, R., Mansfeld, L., & Wainwright, E. (2023). Do know harm’: Examining the intersecting capabilities of young people from refugee backgrounds through community sport and leisure programmes. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 58, 1135.
Submission Instructions
Timeline:
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- 300-words Abstracts submission: 30 April 2025
- Invitations to submit paper: 15 May 2025
- Full Papers due for submission: September 2025
- Final papers accepted: May 2026
Invited contributors will be asked to submit a full-length paper of no more than 9,000 words by the first half of September 2025. The World Leisure Journal is committed to promote the submission and publication of papers in a diversity of languages, and we accept and encourage submissions that are not in English for this special issue.
We also welcome paper submissions that are authored, or co-authored, by activists, artists/artivists and/or community organizers. Community members/organizers, activists and cultural producers who are interested in contributing to this special issues, but are less familiar with writing for academic publications can contact the guest editors to discuss how proposed contributions can be converted into a potential submission.
For further information, and to submit abstracts for consideration to the Special Issue, please contact:
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- Dr Nicola De Martini Ugolotti: ndemartiniugolotti@bournemouth.ac.uk
- Dr. Robyn Smith: r.smith10@lboro.ac.uk