Brett Lashua's research while affiliated with University College London and other places
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Publications (62)
In June 2014, the UK Government made khat (Catha edulis) a Class C drug under the UK Misuse of Drugs Act. Based on limited evidence, this decision went against the Government's own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and has divided members of the British–Somali diaspora, where khat is a popular form of recreation. The Government’s decision to...
This first academic collection dedicated to popular music in Leeds - developed from the work of interdisciplinary scholars, drawn from a major public museum exhibition “Sounds of Our City” and built upon contemporary research. Leeds has rich musical histories and heritage, a long tradition of vibrant music venues, nightclubs, dance halls, pubs and...
This paper explores the relationship between khat-chewing and feelings of collective sociality amongst older and middle-aged men living in Britain's Somali diaspora. The research's core investigates the feeling of moral connectivity, a sense of belonging with others based around a shared reading of Somali-British identity. Here, the paper explores...
This chapter takes as its focus a documentary film, Routes Jukebox (2015), as a ‘record’ of music, place and heritage. Commissioned by the Liverpool International Music Festival (LIMF), Routes Jukebox explores Liverpool’s musical heritage by (re)connecting the city to its cultural ‘roots and routes’ (Gilroy, 1993), including musical influences from...
This Special Issue centralizes powerful leisure stories that may otherwise be understood as myths—sometimes recognized, often less so—that circulate in the field, and beyond. In everyday use, a myth perpetuates a popularly held belief that is false or untrue. However, in social and cultural theory, myths are more complex, as partial truths that pri...
This editorial sets the conceptual frame of reference for the special issue. It examines key themes at the intersection of activist leisure and critical event studies. Drawing on a wide range of social and leisure theory, we establish the critical lens of the Disrupt! project. Funded by Leeds Beckett University, Disrupt! used a variety of innovativ...
As the world grapples with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, on almost every news website, across social media, and also in its (many) absences, leisure has taken on new significance in both managing and negotiating a global crisis. Amidst the disruption, inconvenience, illness, fear, uncertainty, tragedy and loss from this disease, there are al...
In this article, we investigate the discursive context of community-based youth centers to critically interrogate ideas and practices concerning leisure, youth, and youth centers. Using publicly available documents and data collected with youth at two community-based youth centers, we ask, what is the “good”’ they do for young people, and how do yo...
This article introduces our bicycle-based cinema device—the “kino-cine- bomber”—as a vehicle to re-imagine disused buildings and obsolete urban infrastructure for re-activated public leisure spaces. It is also a vehicle to conceptualize theoretical relations among leisure, architecture, cinematic geographies, and urban spaces. Through these lenses,...
This book is a sequel to our first book, Sounds and the City: Popular Music, Globalization and Place (2014). It continues the conversations by tuning into various soundings of urban life as measured out in music. As with the first book, which germinated in conversations among the co-editors as colleagues chatting about popular music—from recent gig...
Closing off the book, the co-editors offer reflections on the breadth and depth of case studies included and the potential for further scholarship at the intersections of popular music and cities.
Focused on Cleveland, Ohio, this chapter asks how “music cities” make their claims-to-fame. What underscores Cleveland’s assertion as the “birthplace” of rock ‘n’ roll and, since 1995, the site of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Drawing from archival research, the chapter explores a microhistorical case study of the city’s popular music heritage. C...
This book draws from a rich history of scholarship about the relations between music and cities, and the global flows between music and urban experience. The contributions in this collection comment on the global city as a nexus of moving people, changing places, and shifting social relations, asking what popular music can tell us about cities, and...
Khat-chewing, a controversial leisure activity within the Somali diaspora in Britain, has received little attention within the academic field of Leisure Studies. This paper reports on ethnographic research to provide insights into the unique locations where young British-Somali men chew khat, exposing the liminal qualities of such localities. The p...
There is a long, underlying presence of futurology—attempts to predict the future based on current or past events—throughout much of the leisure literature. On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Leisure Sciences, I build on the work of futures scholars (e.g., Adam, 2008 Adam, B. (2008). Future matters: Futures known, created and minded. Twenty...
This is the first handbook devoted entirely to leisure theory, charting the history and philosophy of leisure, theories in religion and culture, and rational theories of leisure in the Western philosophical tradition, as well as a range of socio-cultural theories from thinkers such as Adorno, Bauman, Weber and Marx. Drawing on contributions from ex...
This chapter traces the philosophical turn toward Anti-Humanism via the Futurists, an artistic and social movement that flared in the early-twentieth century as a radical response to Humanism. Brashly bombastic, the Futurists embraced speed, technology, machinery, cities, noise, pollution, youth and violence. Published in 1909, Marinetti’s “Manifes...
In this introduction to the Palgrave Handbook of Leisure Theory, the editors make the case for the book’s structure and format, and its focus on leisure theory. They discuss the history and development of leisure studies, and its relationship to sociology, cultural studies and other related disciplines and subject fields.
This paper explores research on the power of myth (Barthes 1972) and commonly accepted beliefs, or “doxa” (Bourdieu, 1977), in shaping creative practices inside recording studios. Drawing from two ethnographic case studies of rock and hip-hop artists in recording studios, this paper addresses the (re)production of myths during studio sessions. Thro...
Critical conversations concerning if and how dance ‘fits’ within current (dominant) discourse across physical activity (PA), public health (PH) and sport policy are presented here in the form of commentaries from a ‘collective’ research base and individual ‘worldviews’ that includes the director of an established community-based dance organisation,...
This paper spotlights the sporting lives of young people who live in ‘Redcrest’, a public housing community in the Niagara region of Canada. We report on data culled from neighborhood-centric documents (municipal data, planning council reports, media coverage) and ethnographic fieldwork (interviews, community mapping, go-alongs) collected over eigh...
This chapter focuses on a temporary, site-specific ‘pop up’ cinema held in May 2012 at Marshall’s Mill, Leeds (UK), as a case study of changing urban leisure landscapes. In contrast to the Cineplex, pop up cinema has been described a ‘grassroots movement, where audiences get to participate and experience films communally in unique locations’ (Benne...
The recording studio has been somewhat neglected as a site for ethnographic fieldwork in the field of ethno-musicology and, moreover, the majority of published studies tend to overlook the specific concerns faced by the researcher within these contexts. Music recording studios can be places of creativity, artistry, and collaboration, but they often...
This article centralizes changes within Leeds’ popular ‘musicscape’, i.e., the relations between popular music and urban landscape. Focusing on Leeds’ extreme heavy metal musicscape, we map sites of the Leeds metal scene (past and present) in order to understand
the shifting social relationships, effects of city centre regeneration, and the ways in...
This paper examines and reconceptualises transgression in the Leeds extreme metal music subculture through theories of performance, embodiment and spectacle. The spectacle, for Debord (1967), is a social relation that is alienating and mediated by images and technology. At a live extreme metal concert fans subvert social norms, challenge gendered e...
In Bruce Chatwin’s account of Aboriginal song and travel, The Songlines, the author asked ‘if a musical phrase is a map reference?’ ‘Music’, he is told, ‘is a memory bank for finding one’s way around the world’ (1987, p. 120). Borrowing from Chatwin, this chapter is concerned less with the sounds of a particular city (although cities figure promine...
This book is about popular music and place, principally cities. From Charlie Gillett’s (1970) The Sound of the City and Iain Chambers’ (1985) Urban Rhythms to more recent work such as Krims’ (2007) Music and Urban Geography, attention to popular music has allowed various soundings of the often unfathomable aspects of urban life. Cities have been sp...
As an area of popular and academic interest, the particular nexus of popular music, cities, and globalization continues, and will continue, to generate much discussion, within academia and beyond. This volume originated from conversations among the co-editors about popular music, its histories, and places. As we agreed in our initial conversations,...
This paper examines and reconceptualises transgression in the Leeds extreme metal music subculture through theories of performance, embodiment and spectacle. The spectacle, for Debord (1967), is a social relation that is alienating and mediated by images, visuals, and technology. At a live extreme metal concert fans subvert social norms, challenge...
‘Pop-up’ cinema is a phenomenon in which films are screened publicly at ad hoc venues, often outdoors – e.g. car parks, brownfield sites, beneath roadway flyovers, parks or pedestrianised spaces – screenings can ‘pop up’ literally anywhere. Through the case of a pop-up cinema in May 2012 at Marshall's Mill, a protected heritage site in Leeds (UK),...
This article reports on research that aimed to understand, through a collaborative music-making studio project, how young urban musicians might build a community that could transgress perceived cultural and racialized boundaries and ‘reclaim’ the city centre through their
lyrics and performances. The Liverpool One Project involved sixteen weeks of...
This article focuses on one particular fanzine – Merseysound – and how it provides a grassroots account of Liverpool’s post-punk scene over a three-year period (1979–1982). The fanzine draws attention to the material and historical context of the post-punk scene
and provides a rich and detailed mapping of the performance venues connected to it. Thi...
Liverpool, famously once the home of the Beatles and still the locus of many thriving music scenes, is a city of dramatic memories and transformations. Recently, the city has witnessed an ambitious regeneration agenda that is predicated upon leisure, heritage, culture and entertainment that culminated with the city's re-invention as 2008 European C...
This chapter embraces the paradox that Hoggart expressed (above) in rela tion to two prevailing twenty-first century music and leisure phenomena: Pop Idol reality TV talent programmes and digital music piracy. Certainly more is at stake in popular music than the aversion and compulsion these phenomena provoke; however, at the end of 2009, two news...
Liverpool is widely recognized for its iconic ‘Three Graces’—a trio of grand buildings that stand along the city’s River Mersey waterfront. In this article we argue that there are a similar kind of iconic ‘three graces’ in Liverpool’s popular music and heritage landscapes: the Cavern Club, Eric’s Club, and Cream. These three venues have taken on br...
This paper explores a documentary film‐making approach to leisure scholarship and practice. Two films – Crossing the Line (2007) and Crossing the Line: Northern Exposure (2008) produced by young people to address issues of violence and the politics of place – provide the specific focus of the paper. These films illustrate youth perspectives of neig...
Music has been closely related to movement. Popular musicianship, for example, is commonly spoken and written about using metaphors of mobility: musicians go out on the road, on tour, or gig in the club circuit (Laing, 2008) and most, like the musician noted above, come back. The language of popular music is suffused with movement. For example, the...
This article is concerned with the interplay of young people's biographies and transforming landscapes in south-east Wales. In particular the article focuses on a South Wales Valleys town, Ebbw Vale, to explore how changes to a place can be understood in relation to, and alongside youth transitions. The article reports on the ways in which narrativ...
In this article, a constitutive aspect of the everyday world is attended to, which is too often absent or suppressed in social scientific accounts of social life: noise. A question is raised as to how social science has addressed the question of noise, through a reconsideration of sound and the everyday. Conventional “good practice” for the organiz...
This paper, as indeed the entire special issue, starts from the commonplace proposition that leisure and popular culture go hand in hand. On one hand, popular leisure practices are so much around us that it is easy to take them for granted. On the other hand, these very same practices provide key conduits to social and cultural power, individual ag...
In this paper we describe a spatial approach toward leisure inquiry to report in part on a three‐year, arts‐based ethnographic study conducted through an urban recreation music program called The Beat of Boyle Street. Adopting the French philosopher/sociologist Henri Lefebvre's concepts of “rhythmanalysis” (2004) and the social “production of space...
This paper uses performance as a means of conceptualizing and writing leisure research. This research reports on a three‐year arts‐based ethnographic study of a music‐making programme conducted with Aboriginal young people in Edmonton, Canada, and explores young people's rap music performances. I especially make note of how the research narrative m...
This paper represents musical remixing practices as a means of conducting leisure research. Our research engaged urban Aboriginal-Canadian youth through The Beat of Boyle Street, a music technology program used to teach young people how to produce their own remixes. Through this program we developed a “research remix” of narrative, Indigenous and a...
This article discusses soundscapes created by young people participating in The Beat of Boyle Street, an in-school recreation-based project that teaches inner-city, at-risk youth to make music using computers and audio production software. Participants are predominantly Aboriginal youth, ages 14 to 20, living in poverty and confronting other challe...
This research presents an autoethnographic strategy for self-reflection by sharing stories consistent with Indigenous methodologies and establishing a frame for re-mixing leisure theory. As an autoethnographic study, we reflect on how we have been engaged, changed, and challenged to rethink understandings of leisure and ourselves as leisure scholar...
In this article, we explored ways youth, traditionally silenced, engaged with popular culture to voice experiences and challenge dominant narratives of public schools and daily lives. We also considered how educators use popular culture as critical pedagogy with inner city youth. Through ethnographic bricolage and case study methods, and drawing fr...
In this paper I take note of 'the arts of the remix', in which techniques of producing hip-hop music with First Nations young people in Canada involved remixing both music and research practices. Through a school-based leisure programme called The Beat of Boyle Street, I taught Aboriginal young people to use computers and audio software to make, pr...
The purpose of this study was to determine what leisure studies students believe to be true about leisure, leisure professionals, and the body of knowledge. Leisure is commonly understood as freetime, an activity, and/or a state of mind. Leisure has also been related to developmental action. Data were collected from leisure studies majors at a Midw...
This paper traces the historical development of two trends in radio policy and practice, “megapower” (corporate) and “micropower” (also termed “pirate” or low power FM) broadcasting. In reaction to a flurry of deregulation and corporate consolidation, a micropower movement has recently emerged. My aim is to illustrate some of the political, social,...
A free eprint of this article is available: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CkraVXsg44jJ3aRTtQ9K/full
The purposes of this research were to determine if agreement exists among leisure services practitioners regarding the meaning of leisure and to examine how they describe themselves and the body of knowledge related to leisure services. In addi...
Citations
... Well, first: This isn't a book about deviance (Lamond & Lashua, 2021). ...
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... They uncovered tales of remarkable enterprise and ingenuity in keeping leisure tastes and relationships alive throughout lockdowns. Forms of leisure activity that could be maintained often became more important than ever in lives that were otherwise heavily constrained (see Lashua et al., 2022). ...
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... There is a growing body of research that examines sport and leisure as contexts and resources for belonging, acculturation, and place-making in migration and settlement journeys (Burdsey 2008;Lewis 2015;Stone 2018;Spaaij and Broerse 2019;De Martini Ugolotti 2020;Nunn, Spaaij, and Luguetti 2021;De Martini Ugolotti and Caudwell 2021;Swain, Lashua, and Spracklen 2021;Aquino et al. 2022;Halilovich, Boz, and Kianpour 2022). Research that focuses on engagement in sport has tended to prioritise formal, organised team sports that are culturally dominant in countries of resettlement, such as football (soccer), cricket, and rugby (league and union). ...
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... Whilst some scholars have thus begun to theorise protest and activism as leisure, including case studies ranging from, but not limited to, urban environments (Lamond & Lashua, 2021), homelessness and public space (Harmon, 2019), skateboarding and gentle activism (Glover et al., 2019), and event bidding and new media activism (McGillivray et al., 2019), there remains a dearth of research into the relationship between leisure and lifestyle politics, like fandom, in sport-based sociological thinking. Whilst the particular social worlds of men's and women's professional football have become new cases and contexts of analytical thinking on social movements, protest, activism, digitalisation, and fan engagement (Cleland et al., 2018;Lawrence & Crawford, 2018;Numerato, 2018;Turner, 2023), these contributions focus on both the macro and micro-level events and networks of activists, and their strategies for relational collective action against corporate targets, but in doing so, neglect to unpack the relationship between resistance and identity. ...
... Research on leisure behaviors and practices during the COVID-19 pandemic has pointed out that due to government sanctioned stay-athome orders and social distancing rules, new leisure rituals developed around walking, bread baking, and digital theatre-going, to name a few (Easterbrook-Smith, 2021;Sharp, 2023). Alongside these home-based leisure practices, digital leisure practices boomed, seen in the rise of Tik-Tok dances and family Zoom quizzes (Lashua et al., 2021). ...
... La deriva es definida por Debord (1958) (ver figura 1) como una técnica vinculada a la acción de caminar por ambientes variados con un comportamiento lúdico-constructivo, pero también con conciencia de los efectos psicogeográficos (Lashua, 2020;Goncalves, 2019) que la actividad tiene en el paseante, y por lo tanto con nociones bastante diferentes de las propias del viaje o paseo. "El procedimiento consistía en la creación de desplazamientos transitorios de carácter urbano e industrial, desde los que el individuo vivía una aventura a través de la vida diaria" (Lapeña Gallego, 2014, p. 24). ...
... Oldenburg harmadik hely elméletének értékvilága tehát sokkal inkább utilitáriánus, mintsem hedonisztikus színezetű, a városszociológus az amerikai középosztály számára kereste a szélesen értelmezett fennmaradás (a változó világhoz való alkalmazkodás, a mentális egészség és a társadalmi státusz megőrzése) útját, amit egyfelől az ideáltipikus kisvárosi életmód megóvásában, másfelől az informális közéletre alkalmas színterekben lelt meg. Ez a megközelítés látszik visszatükröződni a "jó hely" szóösszetétel szabadidős kutatásokban is megjelenő fokozatos térnyerésében, egyre több 2 vizsgálat eredményeit közreadó publikáció címében találkozhatunk a good place for vagy a good place to kifejezésekkel (Hannah 2018;Sharpe, Lashua, van Ingen 2022). ...
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... 5 4 There are other kinds, also touching on leisure and contemporary politics. Some apply situationist-inspired methods, say, when arranging midnight cricket matches in London's financial district to challenge the use of urban space (see for instance Lashua & Baker, 2019). 5 Knitting and crocheting are old crafts with wide-ranging social and geographical distribution and recognized utility. ...
... With this in mind, it is significant to read a monograph which takes popular Viennese electronic music as its main subject. There is a steadily growing literature about place and music, which often takes electronic music into account (see for instance Lashua, Spracklen and Wagg 2014;Lashua, Wagg, Spracklen and Yavuz 2019), and several books and articles dig into Austrian popular music (for example, Ahlers and Jacke 2017;Reitsamer and Prokop 2017). However, in this volume, the city is not at stake, but rather music and its cultural history in a well-defined era, from 1990 to 2015. ...
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... It is a plant or tree with leaves imported into other countries but has long been chewed in eastern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula (2). Chewing khat is prohibited in some nations, such as the US, and is considered a controlled substance in Canada (3), but it is legal in some European countries (4). ...
