Introduction: special issue on Canada @150: engaging/creating our leisure legacies

In May of 2017, leisure scholars from Canada and, in a few cases, around the world, gathered in Kitchener, Ontario for the 15^th Canadian Congress on Leisure Research (CCLR). In connection with this triennial event, a special issue of this journal was proposed with a view to providing, as was stated in the special issue call for papers, ‘a platform for scholars and practitioners to critically explore and grapple with legacies that need to be challenged, as well as to celebrate legacies that are being, or could be, created.’ After long months of submissions, reviews, and re-submissions, we proudly offer this collection of five compelling papers. We hope the papers provide not the last words on these issues, but instead prompt us to continue to challenge dominant ways of knowing and practicing leisure and to nurture the seeds of new approaches.

“Legacy. What is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.”

Alexander Hamilton, The World Was Wide Enough

As noted in the quotation above, the notion of legacy pushes us to look ahead: what are we putting in place now that will support our efforts in the future? What new legacies can we introduce or underscore to build a better leisure studies field? In ‘What does it take to build sustainable intersectoral recreation initiatives? Learning from the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR)’, Hutchinson, Lauckner, Gallant, Silversides, and Meisner take up the intersectoral challenge inherent in the vision of the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association and the Interprovincial Sport and Recreation Council (CPRA/ISRC) of a Canada ‘in which every citizen is engaged in meaningful, accessible recreation experiences that foster individual, community and environmental well-being’ (CPRA/ISRC, 2015, p. 18). The learnings presented by their project and highlighted in the paper speak clearly to issues of policy-led implementation – not just their particular case of the Framework for Recreation in Canada – but stretch us to consider future efforts to build leisure practices that address barriers to participation using evidence and centred on multi-stakeholder collaboration and engagement.

Wilkinson, Harvey, and Tabbane offer an opportunity to reflect on the essential issues of mental health, inclusion, and the role of community-based recreation with their paper, ‘Leisure education and active participation for persons with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.’ Mental health is an issue demanding increasing, even urgent, research attention and their project and paper moves us forward in thinking about the role of leisure-led supports broadly, but community-based leisure more specifically, in supporting persons with these disorders. Given our past, shameful, legacies with regard to treating persons experiencing mental health challenges, the work of these authors presents a hopeful step in developing new leisure practices.

Related to considering new leisure practices, the notion of legacy affords an opportunity to challenge and unsettle how we have come to know leisure. Indeed, what methodological legacies have become dominant in our field and what are the implications of these well-trod pathways for social justice and change? In ‘How do you know if you don’t try? Non-traditional research approaches, novice researchers, and leisure studies in Canada’, McSweeney and Faust offer a brave accounting of their efforts, as graduate students, to push beyond traditional methodological approaches towards new ways of knowing and thinking about leisure. Readers are encouraged to hear their call to support new methodological approaches in their roles not just as leisure scholars, but also as supervisors, committee members, and even reviewers of journal articles. Flanagan, with ‘Troubling gendered umbrellas: Engaging complexity within legacies of leisure research’ dares us to deepen our thinking about (un)settled identity notions such as gender and to consider the implications of its traditional – typically binarized – use in our field. Both papers push scholars to move out of comfortable, protected conceptual spaces and to re-think dominant and frequently unquestioned legacies of knowing leisure.

Arellano, Friis, and Stuart aim squarely at the Canada@150 theme of the special issue with ‘Pathways to Reconciliation: The Kitcisakik land-based education initiative’. While leisure scholars are beginning to come to terms with issues of Reconciliation and to take up some of the calls to action put forward by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, 2015), the project described by the authors and the points made in this paper go further and compel us to work harder to challenge the legacy of settler colonialism that continues to shape not just the Canadian experience, but leisure practices and knowledges.

All told, these five papers are the product of admirable and earnest attempts to contribute to what must be an ongoing conversation about leisure legacies in our field. Supported by remarkably thoughtful (and timely – thank you!) reviews, the works collected here represent a critical, risky, and hopeful response to the call for papers.

Where to next?

Exploring our legacies gives us a good opportunity to reflect on the richness of our field and research community, to ask where we come from, and how relevant we have become. However, we need to reconsider our approach; to address inaccessibility in our communities; to be more relevant to our aging population and growing income inequality; to revisit our methodological approaches and how we do research; to explore issues of indigeneity and settler colonialism both in terms of leisure scholarship and in critical explorations of on-the-ground experiences of leisure and recreation for members of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities; to completely reconstruct hardwired conceptions of gender identity; and to always factor in the fundamental context of climate change, which increasingly shapes everything we do. To do these things, we have to acknowledge that our legacies are somehow a mixture of old concepts in need of new lenses, and of old problems looking for new solutions. In such a way, decades of research, discussions, and debates in leisure studies have become both a blessing and a curse. More than ever, we need to explore effectively, creatively, and critically those issues by leaving the beaten track. Paradoxically, however, we cannot reconsider our legacies without reflecting on what has been handed down from the past and contemplate the ever-growing maturity of leisure research in our country.

As a research community, figuring out ‘where to next?’ is intrinsically linked to ‘with whom?’ and ‘how?’, which underlie conceptual, pragmatic, and methodological challenges. After all, exploring our legacies forces us to acknowledge that those realities we wish to tackle are not ours alone. Leisure studies are intimately linked to other research initiatives, policies, and social issues both inside and outside our usual borders, where different ideologies, values, and experiences are superimposed. We also are challenged to collaborate with those outside our field, to work with new partners, and to debate using languages that are not necessarily ours. We will be asked to be part of discussions that have global import, such as climate change, and to engage new contexts and address unavoidable problems, which will influence our principles and shape everything we do. At the same time, asking ourselves what we can bring to the table reflects the diversity of our research community and the heterogeneity of our disciplinary approaches, which is a strength in and of itself.

Indeed, addressing those issues, sharing new ideas, confronting our vision and being critical of our own legacies can be the first steps, and the planting of seeds in the garden and the careful reflection upon what we wish to leave behind can follow. The Canadian Association for Leisure Studies meets again for CCLR in Edmonton in May of 2020. We look forward to continuing the conversation and hearing about new leisure legacies to come.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Naima Samuel, a graduate student in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo, for her outstanding efforts to support the early stages of preparation for this collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.