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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Clifton EversORCiD
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Violence. Violence everywhere. Dead crabs by the many thousands on the beach. Dead fish too. Sick dogs and concerned owners. Ponds full of tires. Bubbles surfacing from broken gas pipes somewhere ‘down there’ at the bottom of the river. The wind sweeping through the wreckage of an abandoned steelworks providing an incessant hum echoing across this blue space ‘wasteland’. Someone fishing sits huddled on a concrete jetty. A surfer, shivering, hurriedly pulls and tugs on a neoprene wetsuit as they dance on the snow. A beachcomber hunts for washed up plastics to turn into art. No-one is supposed to be here. It’s not only pollution (both physical and cultural) to worry about. Government Covid-19 restriction demand everyone stay home. There’s a pandemic. Yet, it’s widely known that encounters with nature – this post-industrial ‘wasteland’ is nature too – can make you feel better emotionally, psychologically, physically. So, people disobey government regulations. Leisure is at times a mode of loving. Here I am reading love as wellbeing, repair, care, regeneration, survival, and revival. Drawing on community-based storytelling and creative methodologies to understand a case study of a post-industrial ‘shadow places’ (Plumwood, 2008) in north-east England, this presentation examines how through ‘polluted leisure’ and ‘resigned activism’ people tactically practice love for place, community, and self. I argue that this love does not occur in spite of the violence of capital, pollution, extraction, socio-cultural marginalisation, and ecological damage but an honesty about being intimately entangled with such.
Author(s): Evers C
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: Leisure Studies Association Annual Conference
Year of Conference: 2022
Acceptance date: 20/05/2022
URL: https://www.falmouth.ac.uk/research/programmes/inequality-and-storytelling/leisure-studies-conference-2022
