Deviant Leisure and Consumer Culture

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

Broadly speaking, leisure and recreation have been viewed as fundamentally positive in their pursuit and ends, offering the subject the opportunity of freedom and liberation to create their own unique lifestyles and identities in the cultural fluidity of late modernity. Consequently, this has left little room for a consideration of how harm and deviance can feature in the realms of leisure. This collection of papers provides a corrective to this trend, re-considering the myriad harms associated with familiar, culturally embedded and celebrated forms of leisure through a critical interrogation of the socially corrosive nature consumer culture and late-capitalism. Reflecting upon the wider theoretical concept of ‘Deviant Leisure’ (Smith and Raymen, 2015), these papers begin to outline a typology of harm for a deviant leisure perspective. The papers presented here bring leisure and consumer culture out of the shadows and into the spotlight of a more critical and culturally-nuanced theoretical criminology.

Sub Unit

• Area III: Perspectives on Crime and Criminal Behavior / 5: Cultural, Disorganization and Anomie Perspectives

Individual Presentations

• The Seduction of the Fist Fight: Deviant Leisure, Conflict Sports and the Lure of Organised Violence - Victoria Silverwood, Birmingham City University

• Uncaged: Mixed Martial Arts, Ultra-Realist Criminology, Violence and the Ethnographic Lens. - James Treadwell, Birmingham City University

• Ladbrokes Life: Gambling Identities and Deviant Leisure - Thomas Raymen, Plymouth University

• A Journey of a Lifetime: The Relationship between Leisure, Pleasure and Harm in ‘Extra-Ordinary’ Tourist Spaces. - Jo Large, Teesside University

Chair

• Oliver Smith, Plymouth University, UK