Guest editorial

In this issue, we conclude Volume 28 with the first ever Leisure Studies themed collection focused on disability and leisure. The topic is timely. In 2006, the United Nations launched the Treaty on Rights for the Disabled that was an attempt to ensure the quality of life for the world’s estimated 650 million disabled people. This treaty included mention of accessible sport and leisure provision (Article 30) as being of paramount importance to the quality of life of humankind. It is, therefore, an appropriate time to consider the role of leisure in the lives of people with disabilities and to draw attention to research that is being conducted in this area of study. This special issue of Leisure Studies includes articles at the forefront of disability research, from a variety of disciplinary bases, including social anthropology, sociology, human geography and leisure management as well as disability and leisure studies. It covers a diverse array of leisure behaviour – a significant feature of this journal over the past 25 years.

The papers in this issue attempt to offer critical and/or practical insight into the concept of disability, now recognised as a contested terrain. Broadly speaking, following Oliver (1990), much contemporary scholarship, on and with disabled communities, advocates that disability is a social construction that is articulated through public discourse that impacts on different segments of the population in different ways. Some argue that society marginalises those individuals whose embodiment is considered ‘abnormal’ and that impaired individuals are the production of a general disability business (Albrecht, 1992). This characterisation may have some validity when issues of integration in high‐performance sporting institutions are the focus of research (Howe, 2007), but one of the concerns of this special issue is to consider leisure in the round and not just focus on sport.

Much of the literature regarding disability and leisure has focused upon the practice of sport, while the majority of social scientific scholarship around disability and sport has focused upon either the media representation of Paralympic athletes (Schantz and Gilbert, 2001; Schell and Rodriguez, 2001), the constraints placed upon those who wish to engage in sport for the disabled (see Bowen, 2002; Nixon, 2007) or both (Smith and Thomas, 2005). While this sport‐focussed emphasis has been path‐breaking, as is reflected here in Jess Macbeth’s contribution on blind football and in several of the texts featured in the book reviews section, this special issue deliberately avoids a focus on the practice of sport and disability alone.

By focusing upon leisure practices, broadly defined, this collection seeks to complement other work such as the special issue of the Sociology of Sport Journal published in 2001 and the growing number of articles in the academic sport studies literature. We hope that readers find this issue of Leisure Studies theoretically and methodologically diverse yet also challenging of assumed approaches and conventions. People with disabilities will be the first to say that they can be an ‘awkward lot’, disturbing taken for granted assumptions about the world and the way it operates. If this collection triggers similar reflections, we will be pleased with its contribution to not just leisure but also disability studies debates more broadly. We are hopeful that this special issue may open up such debates further and look forward to seeing how leisure studies and other researchers may respond to some of the challenges to orthodoxy within this collection.

The contributions include reviews of the field that challenge leisure scholars to revisit their implicit assumptions, as Cara Aitchison does in a polemical, yet reflective and constructive piece assessing the relationship between the leisure studies ‘canon’ and disability research. Ian Patterson and Shane Pegg demonstrate one way in which a leisure studies concept, ‘serious leisure’, can be operationalised in the context of discussing the role of leisure for people with intellectual disabilities in Australia. Nicola Burns, Kevin Paterson and Nick Watson report on an empirical research project conducted into the opportunities for people with disabilities afforded by different forms of countryside‐based recreation. Simon Darcy and Tracy Taylor return us to Australia and review the impact of legislation on the ‘cultural life’ of people with disabilities – a conception that covers most leisure concerns. Martin Atherton, author of a pioneering study of football and deaf people (Atherton et al., 2000), reports here on a historical study of the role of clubs for the deaf community in Britain. Jess Macbeth takes up the football theme in an examination of the challenges, constraints and possibilities partially sighted players encounter as the sport for blind people in Britain responds to international organisational changes. Hayley Fitzgerald and David Kirk demonstrate the way in which concern with young disabled people connects with recent developments in the study of leisure and family life. Finally, but by no means least, David Howe offers a brief personal meditation on the potential of reflexive ethnography for conducting investigations of the everyday as a leisure researcher. Three book reviews of several publications dealing with sport and disability and the flagship event for elite disabled athletes, the Paralympic Games, then complete this special issue.

Readers will be aware that the contributions to this special issue mainly derive from research and researchers located within the United Kingdom and Australia. Books reviews and reviews of the papers have been carried out by scholars in other parts of the world including North America. As a result, a brief explanation of terminology adopted in this issue is worth making. ‘People first language’ is the style adopted in North America that states that when identifying someone with impairment, the person’s name or pronoun should come first. Hence, acceptable terminology may include: a woman with paraplegia/who is paraplegic or a man with/who has Downs Syndrome. In the UK and Australia, a related ‘people first’ terminology is also used, but more often in the form ‘people with impairments’ (e.g. ‘people with visual impairments’ etc.). However, in the UK, the term ‘disabled people’ is often preferred to ‘people with disabilities’. Because of the culturally diverse ways in which people around the globe articulate the politics of sensitivity, we have largely let the contributors define the terms in a way that they feel is acceptable to their research community.

Finally, as Guest Editors, we would like to thank all the contributors to this special issue for their positive and prompt responses to the feedback they received from our reviewers, the reviewers themselves for their insightful comments and suggestions, and the editorial board of Leisure Studies journal for encouraging us to complete this timely project.