Entertainment, Leisure and Identities

Entertainment, Leisure and Identities
Title Entertainment, Leisure and Identities PDF eBook
Author Alyson Brown
Publisher Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages 150
Release 2009-03-26
Genre Sports & Recreation
ISBN 1443807249

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This wide-ranging collection of essays seeks to challenge the ‘common-sense’ assumption that entertainment activities have no function but to fill up otherwise empty moments. As such it builds on the term – coined by the Victorians – ‘Recreation’, and argues that in the entertainments people pursue they do not simply divert themselves, but actively create and re-create their identities. The collection shows this process can only take place for those who enjoy the benefits of leisure; hence, in the medieval period leisure and entertainments are largely confined to the wealthy minority. In periods of rapid social change, like 19th century Britain, the inter-linked question of identity and entertainment became an issue of great concern. Orderly and respectable activities were seen by many commentators as the key to containing the potential menace of the new urban population. In the 20th century the development of new forms of mass entertainment, such as cinema, radio and television, has generated new debates, in particular about the potential of these new media to manipulate their audiences. The essays, arranged in broadly chronological order, give fascinating and detailed ‘snapshots’ of these processes as they unfold from the middle ages to the present-day. As such the collection makes a very valuable contribution to the historical study of the social and, broadly defined, political role played by entertainments in shaping and reinforcing identities. 'In recent years the history of leisure and, more particularly, the history of leisure pursuits, amusements and "entertainments", has engaged the attention of social historians who, as well as highlighting their intrinsic interests, have demonstrated the contribution which such studies can make to an understanding on social identities and class relationships. This collection of essays explores a wide and eclectic range of "entertainments" - from medieval pet-keeping, Victorian chess tournaments and late 19th century museums of curiosities to French anarchist theatre and the career of Harry Belafonte - themes which until now received little or no scholarly analysis. As such it fills a significant gap in the historical literature.' G. R. Searle, Emeritus Prof. of History, University of East Anglia and Fellow of the British Academy

Leisure Identities and Interactions

Leisure Identities and Interactions
Title Leisure Identities and Interactions PDF eBook
Author John Robert Kelly
Publisher
Total Pages 214
Release 2019
Genre POLITICAL SCIENCE
ISBN 9780429025846

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First published in 1983. Leisure has too often been approached as a set of activities that people do when everything important has been completed. This text provides a different analysis demonstrating the centrality of leisure to human development and to important relationships. In Leisure Identities and Interactions the author analyses leisure in the context of role changes through the life course, but also as a social context in which we work out the identities that express who we really want to be. His focus is on the kinds of leisure that are both most common and most significant face-to-face encounters, family interaction, and episodes found in the midst of our roles and routines. Varieties of leisure styles are found to be developed out of available opportunities and in relation to cultural values, but also are chosen to express and negotiate our self-definitions. Leisure is both social and existential and can best be understood in the dialectic of role expectations and decision. Kelly utilizes symbolic interaction, interpretive, and dramaturgical metaphors to develop a different sociology of leisure one that brings together the concepts of role and identity. Expressive identities and intimate communities are as essential to leisure as they are to life.

Historical Perspectives on Social Identities

Historical Perspectives on Social Identities
Title Historical Perspectives on Social Identities PDF eBook
Author Alyson Brown
Publisher Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages 179
Release 2009-01-14
Genre History
ISBN 1443803995

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This collection of work on the theme of identities was the result of a conference held in the spring of 2005 at Edge Hill under the auspices of The Centre for Liverpool and Merseyside Studies. Whilst a significant proportion of the research focused on Liverpool and the North West, the theme of identities was sufficiently broad to entice scholars from diverse and varied fields. This collection, therefore, reflects the range of work presented and discussed at the conference and the multi-layered and multi-facetted nature of identity. Contributors to this edited collection examined the concept of identity in Britain through a range of historical perspectives, concerning themselves primarily with the later modern period. They reflect the extent to which nineteenth and twentieth century British social, cultural and political change has given rise to pluralist, fragmented and fractured identities and highlight the extent to which class, gender, religious and institutional frameworks have shifted continually. This publication will therefore be of interest to those working in diverse fields but who share an interest in the importance of identity as a decisive cultural, social, economic and political determinant. Questions of identity have centred a good deal of debate in the social sciences, especially since the reception of Foucault's work in the English-speaking world in the last couple of decades. This has often taken a theoretical form. Attempts to link theory with analytical practice have been strongest in the field that might be characterised as the 'politics of identity'. At any rate this has provided an important instance of theoretical and practical conflict. Herethe focus of the debate has been around questions of gender, nation, language, economy, security and race. It has tried toto clarify crucial divisions in the analysis of identity as between explanatory and constitutive models, and between positivist and post-positivist procedures. For the most part these intense and extensive concerns have passed by largely unnoticed among historians practising in Britain in the well-found but conventional idioms of political and social history. What this conference volume seeks to do is to help redress thedeficit, to domesticate some of the theoretical and polemical exchanges around 'identity' into a world of practical,yet conceptually aware historical work. This is a difficult but surely worthwhile task: to broach various imaginaries of identity, issues of identitarian politics, and questions of identity formation on a series of relatively familiar historical contexts. Of course, no selection of subjects for practical research in this way can be exhaustive. The group of essays offered here is sufficiently wide, and occasionally gratifyingly unexpected, at least to begin the job, to stimulate others and, most importantly, to interject theoretical concern into historial fields sometimes lacking it. Ten essays are included, together with the editor's introduction. The pieces are bound together by a common strategy not a shared empirical territory. They range from studies of gendered identity formation , to regional identities formed around seaside resorts, to empirical questions of class and capitalism and their identitarian politics, to historical analysis of mourning, and on to language, nationality, deafness, motherhood and their inflection in identity in past time. This well-edited combination of shared conceptual purpose and variety of empirical form seems to me to work well. The book will be widely used in a variety of historical fields, not least in those which have been the most resistant to recenttheoretical innovations in the social sciences. Keith Nield Editor SOCIAL HISTORY 'This is a fascinating and wide-ranging collection of essays linked by the over-riding theme of identity. While primarily historical in their focus, the essays will be of interest to more than just historians. They raise a variety of interesting conceptual and theoretical issues, from, for instance, the significance of the staymaker in the formation of eighteenth-century female identity, to the relationship between regional identity and late-nineteenth and early twentieth century Lancashire seaside resorts.' Sam Davies, Professor of History, School of Social Science, Liverpool John Moores University

British Cultural Identities

British Cultural Identities
Title British Cultural Identities PDF eBook
Author Mike Storry
Publisher Routledge
Total Pages 209
Release 2013-02-15
Genre History
ISBN 1136252215

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In British Cultural Identities, Mike Storry and Peter Childs assess the degree to which being British impinges on the identity of the many people who live in Britain. They analyze contemporary British identity through the various and changing ways in which people who live in the UK position themselves and are positioned by their culture today. Using examples from contemporary and popular culture, each chapter covers one of seven intersecting themes: place and environment education, work and leisure gender, sex and the family youth culture and style class and politics ethnicity and language religion and heritage. This new edition is fully updated to include Britain's relationship with the wider world, changes in university education and testing in schools, the trend towards electronic entertainment and social networking, the new impact of 'class', and the culture of political leaking.

Leisure Identities and Interactions

Leisure Identities and Interactions
Title Leisure Identities and Interactions PDF eBook
Author John Robert Kelly
Publisher Taylor & Francis
Total Pages 205
Release 1983-01-01
Genre Leisure
ISBN 9780043011508

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Leisure Identities and Interactions

Leisure Identities and Interactions
Title Leisure Identities and Interactions PDF eBook
Author John R. Kelly
Publisher Routledge
Total Pages 342
Release 2019-04-25
Genre Social Science
ISBN 042965510X

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First published in 1983. Leisure has too often been approached as a set of activities that people do when everything important has been completed. This text provides a different analysis demonstrating the centrality of leisure to human development and to important relationships. In Leisure Identities and Interactions the author analyses leisure in the context of role changes through the life course, but also as a social context in which we work out the identities that express who we really want to be. His focus is on the kinds of leisure that are both most common and most significant face-to-face encounters, family interaction, and episodes found in the midst of our roles and routines. Varieties of leisure styles are found to be developed out of available opportunities and in relation to cultural values, but also are chosen to express and negotiate our self-definitions. Leisure is both social and existential and can best be understood in the dialectic of role expectations and decision. Kelly utilizes symbolic interaction, interpretive, and dramaturgical metaphors to develop a different sociology of leisure one that brings together the concepts of role and identity. Expressive identities and intimate communities are as essential to leisure as they are to life.

Identity Investments

Identity Investments
Title Identity Investments PDF eBook
Author Joel Stillerman
Publisher Stanford University Press
Total Pages 393
Release 2023-02-14
Genre Social Science
ISBN 1503634418

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After Pinochet's dictatorship ended in Chile in 1990, the country experienced a rapid decline in poverty along with a quickly growing economy. As a result, Chile's middle class expanded dramatically, echoing trends seen across the Global South as neoliberalism took firm hold in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Identity Investments examines the politics and consumption practices of this vast and varied fraction of the Chilean population, seeking to better understand their value systems and the histories that informed them. Using participant observation, interviews, and photographs, Joel Stillerman develops a unique typology of the middle class, made up of activists, moderate Catholics, pragmatists, and youngsters. This typology allows him to unearth the cultural, political, and religious roots of middle-class market practices in contrast with other studies focused on social mobility and exclusionary practices. The resultant contrast in backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives of these four groups animates this book and extends an emerging body of scholarship focused on the connections between middle-class market choices and politics in the Global South, with important implications for Chile's recent explosive political changes.