Summit meeting: highlighst from the 2001 Leisure Research Symposium in Denver - Research Update

Parks & Recreation, Sept, 2002 by Mark Havitz, Myron Floyd

Editor's note: This special issue of Research Update highlights six of the 33 research sessions at last year's NRPA Congress. See the reference listing at the end of this article for information about the full book of abstracts from the Research Symposium. You're invited to attend SPRE Research events at this year's Congress in Tampa. The 2002 Research Roundtable, "Assessing and Evaluating Recreation Programs and Services," will take place Wednesday, Oct. 16, from 8:00-11:15 a.m. The opening session of this year's Leisure Research Symposium will begin later that day at l:00 p.m. For more information go to www.nrpa.org.

The social meaning of leisure and the significance of place have been of longstanding interest to leisure researchers. In its various forms, leisure connects people to places, and helps to imbue places with functional and symbolic meaning that define and shape leisure, thus suggesting important and dynamic relationships between leisure and place. Recently, an increasing number of scholars and practitioners have become intrigued by the political and contested nature of these relationships. Questions have included:

* How does leisure structure places so that places take on one set of meanings and not another?

* How does leisure transform places, leading to empowering certain individuals, groups and communities but not others?

* Who decides how particular place meanings are valued?

* What kinds of policy questions emerge from an understanding of these connections?

Symposium keynote, William Riebsame Travis, of the University of Colorado's Department of Geography, tackled these and other issues. This session drew attention to the social and political implications of the leisure-place nexus, and stimulated dialogue about the role of leisure in the politics of place as a topic for research. Three leisure studies academics, Patricia Stokowski, Leo McAvoy and Daniel Williams, served as respondents to Travis.

Managing Change

One of the more provocative sessions in the general program, "Leisure Meaning: Place, Community and Conflict" built on themes developed in the keynote session. Diane Samdahl traced the historic rise and demise of American Beach, an African-American resort located along the northern Florida coast, "an important piece of history not often addressed in our literature--the development of segregated recreation sites during the days of Jim Crow." Although the resort of choice for many African-Americans in the mid 20th century, American Beach is today relatively impoverished and surrounded by large upscale resorts on the Sea Islands. Economic pressure to develop this property is intense. The recreation and leisure literature is relatively devoid of history related to Jim Crowera leisure programs. Samdahl called for more sensitivity and attention to these issues from commercial recreation professionals, public sector planners, and faculty and students in academic recreation and leisure studies programs. Acknowledging the considerable support in the literature for the value of high investment leisure activities as sources of self-enhancement, Susan Hutchison and Doug Kleiber nevertheless made a case for the meaning of causal leisure, such as that which occurs when reading a newspaper or playing with a pet. Juxtaposing casual leisure with currently more-popular concepts, Hutchison and Kleiber argued that "ordinary moments of enjoyment are important for their ability to connect people with their past, and to symbolize ways of being in the world that affirm personal values and possibilities for the future." In marked contrast to Hutchison and Kleiber's presentation, Heather Gibson and colleagues from the University of Florida explored the "serious leisure" attributes of college football fans. They argued that, far from being easily dismissed as a casual pursuit, fandom is characterized by perseverance, career, personal effort, unique ethos and group membership; these are characteristics of more widely recognized serious leisure pursuits such as model railroading and contact bridge.

Questions emerging from this session included:

* To what extent should recreation professionals and leisure researchers be proactive with respect to historic preservation of leisure-based facilities and places, especially if that preservation potentially limits or infringes on current leisure amenity development?

* How should we react when the rights and sensibilities of disadvantaged communities come in conflict with mainstream development and relative economic privilege?

* Is it possible that recreation professionals and leisure researchers are predisposed in favor of providing, facilitating and studying serious and enduring leisure contexts to the relative exclusion of informal day-to-day occurrence?

Recreation Delivery

At least a half-dozen papers focused on professional issues related to recreation and leisure services delivery. Jo An Zimmerman and Larry Allen argued that objective agency descriptors, such as type of administrative authority, administrative pattern, funding sources, and number and type of areas and facilities, are of limited value to many professionals seeking advice and counsel. Instead, they argued, cultural perspectives are much more promising. They discussed several organizational culture models that may be useful to inform professional practice. In contrast, Cheryl Estes examined outcomes related to leisure, recreation, play and freedom. Estes argued that "leisure, in post-modern culture, is not time-, place- or activity-dependent, but rather, experience engaged in the context of freedom that generates meaning for the individual and/or community. This model has the potential to clarify the role of the leisure services professional and guide them in their daily practice in ways that facilitate the creation of a better society."