Postleisure: Disrupting the Disciplinary Fixity of Leisure Thinking

Abstract

This paper is a postdisciplinary exploration of leisure and the conceptual corollaries of recreation and adventure. It seeks to broaden the ontological discourse in the field and demonstrate that alternative approaches to theorising about and studying leisure, recreation, and tourism are possible – if not necessary – amid concerns and critiques stemming from posthumanism, climate change, decoloniality, and the mobilities of hope and despair. It is argued that leisure as an object of inquiry has been largely possible due to the fragmentation of being, namely the creation of dichotomies that juxtapose different states of being. By dismantling the disciplinary confines of leisure, it is shown that leisure and recreation can be reconsidered vis-à-vis empirical ontology as deeper engagement with questions of being and becoming in lived contexts and in relation to other entities and things. The suggested pathway of thinking beyond leisure might be valued particularly by emerging conceptual and ethical pioneers keen to reexamine and reimagine how we are in and become with the world.