Our member, Dr. Utsa Mukherjee (Brunel University London, UK), talks about his edited collection, Childhoods & Leisure: Cross-Cultural and Inter-Disciplinary Dialogues (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
This edited volume brings together interdisciplinary scholarship on children’s everyday leisure from across the globe, addressing key questions around children’s agency, rights, child-adult relations and social change. It is positioned to inaugurate a new frontier of research within leisure studies— one that bridges the two interdisciplinary fields of childhood studies and leisure studies. This book champions a cross-cultural and social justice agenda that does not privilege global north childhoods but acknowledges the multiplicity of lived childhoods across the globe and their inter-connections. By drawing attention to children’s leisure—across multiple genres such as organized leisure, sports, play and digital leisure—from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, the chapters in this book drive a new wave of research that advances the intellectual remit of both childhood studies and leisure studies.
The contributors in this volume are based across six different continents with backgrounds in sociology, anthropology, education, cultural studies, psychology, history, public health, architecture and playwork. In their work, the authors deploy a wide range of methodologies—from ethnography to interviews, from archival work to digital methods—that produce deep insights into children’s lived experiences and/or the way childhoods are constructed by adults vis-à-vis leisure. This disciplinary, geographical and methodological diversity adds to the richness of this volume.
This book grew out of a sense of frustration and opportunity. As a sociologist researching children’s leisure for almost a decade now, it was frustrating to see that children’s leisure has fallen between the cracks of leisure studies and childhood studies with little to no intellectual conversation between these two fields of research. Leisure scholars studying children’s leisure published in specialist leisure journals and hardly drew on debates in childhood studies. Similarly, childhood researchers writing about leisure almost entirely sidestepped leisure theories.
In my work, I have attempted to bring these two fields into a dialogue and develop critical scholarship on children’s leisure. But the arena of children’s leisure is vast and cannot be contained within one disciplinary boundary. Indeed, each social science discipline has something important to offer towards the development of critical scholarship on children’s leisure that draws simultaneously from leisure studies and childhood studies and contributes to the development of both. This is the untapped opportunity that led to this volume.
The authors in the volume come from different parts of the world and from diverse disciplinary backgrounds; each bringing their unique perspectives and intellectual vantage points to bear on their work on children’s leisure. As an editor it has been my privilege to work with this rich collection of chapters and it is my pleasure to present this volume to scholars and students working in this area, or those simply taking a passing interest.
The phrase ‘childhoods and leisure’ prominent in the title of this volume, and the issue of children’s leisure more specifically, draws us headlong into questions that are pivotal to the fields of childhood studies and leisure studies. It demands interrogation of the way we theorise childhood and leisure respectively, prompting reflections on how inclusive or ethno-centric our existing conceptualisation of these terms are. Without confronting these core, foundational matters there is no scope for mounting cross-cultural studies of children’s leisure. It is by grappling with these issues that this volume will facilitate dialogues between the fields of leisure studies and childhood studies, which has long been overdue. This is particularly unfortunate since research on children’s leisure has a lot to gain by drawing on conceptual and methodological debates from both these interdisciplinary fields. In the absence of sustained dialogue between these two fields, the growth of scholarship in this important area has been stunted. Therefore, the aim of this volume is to address this lacuna and thereby inaugurate a new frontier of research on children’s leisure: one that fosters a holistic understanding of children’s leisure from cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary perspectives, and bridges the fields of childhood studies and leisure studies. […]
Leisure studies as a field of research has not only been ethno-centric and geographically exclusionary in its scope, but its primary assumptions have also been adult-centric. That is to say, the taken-for-granted leisure actor whose leisure practices, behaviours and experiences have provided the basis for leisure theorisation till date has been an adult. Leisure studies is in no way an outlier in this regard, and in fact this is a reality is all major social sciences where adulthood continues to be “the unarticulated background to a majority of social enquiries” and the default status of the social actors in these studies (Blatterer, 2007, p. 771). Consequently, no substantive sub-field dedicated to children’s leisure exists within leisure studies and extant scholarship on children’s leisure is quite fragmented. For example, when McGovern et al. (2022) reviewed contents of nine major leisure studies journals over the last five decades, they could only find eight published studies that had a young child (aged six or younger) as a research participant while five other articles reported parents’ and teachers’ perspectives on children’s leisure. The dearth of child-focused scholarship in leisure studies remains an issue.
It is therefore undeniable that “children’s voices are missing in leisure publications” (McGovern et al., 2022, p. 303) and its roots go deep into the pervasive adult-centrism of the field (Mukherjee, 2020). There has hardly been any serious engagement between leisure studies and childhood studies which could have addressed these issues and paved the way for child-focused/child-centred leisure research. This, however, does not mean that no research exists on the question of children’s leisure broadly understood. If we comb through social science scholarship especially the works of social/cultural anthropologists, sociologists, human geographers and historians over the years, we can tease out instances where children’s leisure has been talked about, usually in passing, without those works necessarily being primarily about children’s leisure. This fragmented extant literature is hardly ever situated within the folds of leisure studies. Engaging with this body of work comes with its own opportunities and challenges. It enables us to chart changes and continuities not only in the content and form of children’s leisure across time and place, but they also illuminate the changing lenses through which researchers have approached the study of children’s leisure. Further, many of these studies do not talk about leisure per se but dwell on children’s play and games or make references to free-time (Chick, 2000). In looking back at this geographically-diverse historical literature and picking out instances of children’s leisure from them, I am conscious of Montgomery’s (2009) reflections on cross-cultural childhood research where she points that:
The claim that children were conceptualized one way among the Tikopia of Polynesia in the 1920s and very differently among the Nuer of southern Sudan ten years later, or that Margaret Mead found very different understandings of adolescence among people in the USA and in the south Pacific island of Samoa is liable to be extremely trite unless a deeper analysis can be uncovered. (p. 9)
Taking Montgomery’s (2009) recommendation on board, I am going to look at some of the ways in which children’s leisure has been written about over the years. My intention here is to not to furnish a comprehensive list of such studies over the years, but to throw light on the absent presence of children’s leisure within social science scholarship—especially those produced by anthropologists, human geographers and sociologists— and reflect on the changing conceptual approaches to the same. Rather than simply cherry pick or compare examples of children’s leisure at random, I will be driving at what Montgomery (2009, p. 9) calls a “deeper analysis” by situating these works in their cultural and historical context. I will demonstrate how children’s leisure can provide a generative window into the society and group it operates within. Broadly speaking, when it comes to social science scholarship on children’s leisure, four main approaches or lenses have been deployed over the years, namely social evolutionism, ‘children’s culture’, developmental sciences and critical childhood studies. I will now reflect on each of these conceptual prisms through which children’s leisure lives have been approached and analysed in the annals of social science research.