Leisure activism and engaged ethnography: heterogeneous voices and the urban palimpsest

ABSTRACT

Studying the conflictualities between leisure activism, understood as participation in events of dissent as a nonwork-based activity, and those tasked with ‘maintaining order’, requires techniques that can work with diverse voices and contesting world views. However, many of the methods familiar to us in the social sciences risk reinforcing relationships of power that can undermine such inquiry. Drawing on the conceptual work of scholars from the global south and the global north, we examine approaches to protests as event, the construction of urban space and the performativity of violence, in two democracies: Brazil and the UK. From that we were led to conclude such research requires a less canonical approach. It is through the adoption of a more engaged ethnography, one that establishes horizontal relations between researchers and participants that are drawn from backgrounds reflecting such conflictualities, combined with an understanding of the process of research as more like that of an event, that the diversity of the heterogeneous voices associated with dissent, within an urban palimpsest, can be heard.

KEYWORDS:

• Leisure activism
• protest
• researcher/participant collaboration
• global south
• engaged research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Cluster Award: Leeds Beckett University.

Notes on contributors

Ian R. Lamond

Ian R. Lamond is a senior lecturer in Events Studies and part of the UK Centre for Events Management at Leeds Beckett University (UK). His PhD is in cultural policy and political sociology and his research interests include: events of dissent; social movements; political and cultural sociology and critical event studies. He is co-author of the monograph “Critical Event Studies“ (2016), published by Routledge.

Esther Solano

Esther Solano Gallego gained her PhD in Sociology from Complutense University of Madrid and is professor of International Relations at the Federal University of Sao Paulo (Brazil). Her research focuses on political sociology. Her last books are “Hate as Politics“ (2018) and “Brazil in Collapse“ (2019)

Vitor Blotta

Vitor Blotta is professor of Journalism and Media Law at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), and Vice-Coordinator of the Centre for the Study of Violence at the same university. His research involves topics such as critical theory; the public sphere; human rights; media and communications policies; social movements, and culture.