Unraveling the Research Process: Humanizing Leisure Scholars

Abstract

This special issue focuses on the behind-the-scenes, often messy, occurrences of leisure research. Leisure scholars’ engagement in reflexive, collaborative, critical, arts-based, participative, and social justice-oriented research, increase the need to explore and examine significant moments that punctuate and undoubtedly shape the research and themselves as individuals. Humanizing research inherently involves humanizing leisure scholars. Authors in this issue illustrate tensions, absences, and unresolved challenges experienced in research— experiences that are typically left out of the conventional, smooth, and linear discussion of research that generally appears in academic publications. As loose ends of the research process are unraveled, this special issue inspires us to expand the ways we come to know and do research.

Keywords:

• Reflexivity
• qualitative research
• messiness
•  research
• leisure research