Wasted: towards a critical research agenda for disposability in leisure

ABSTRACT

‘Garbage Island’. ‘The Pacific Trash Vortex’. ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch’. Titles abound for the growing build-up of waste, mostly microplastic and non-biodegradable, floating in the North Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately, Garbage Island is just one egregious example of how human activities are exacting an enormous toll on the planet. Considerations of waste should be central to our field, not merely due to the degree to which leisure practices are deeply implicated in its production but because the very provision of leisure opportunities often rests on disposability. The time is ripe to develop a research agenda for understanding waste and disposability in leisure. This research note presents a brief accounting of waste as it has been taken up in our field in an effort to set a path forward for understanding and addressing this issue. Of course, explorations of consumption in leisure studies is well-trod ground and, arguably, critical considerations of how individuals consume through leisure (i.e. conspicuous consumption) form the backbone of our field. Rather surprisingly, however, relatively little, critical attention has been given to the very notion of waste, or the disposability that undergirds the material production and provision of leisure.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• discard studies
• consumption
• critical leisure studies
• garbage

Acknowledgements

A draft version of this paper was given at The Academy of Leisure Sciences conference in March, 2022. I also want to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments and stimulating suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).