Estudios de Ocio en el Congreso Mundial de Ocio

Estudios de Ocio estará presente en el Congreso Mundial de Ocio a celebrar en ChuCheon (Korea) del 28 de agosto al 2 de septiembre a través de tres comunicaciones que han sido aceptadas por el Comité científico:

Inclusion in leisure as a social identity enabler: An operational strategy focused on youth with disabilities.

The implementation of inclusion in leisure is a tool for ensuring the access of everyone to the community leisure offer. Access to leisure for people with disabilities is determined because, even today, it is a group at risk of exclusion, the leisure offer excludes them because they don’t fulfill the necessary conditions for a full participation.
Promoting the inclusion in leisure is to recognize what makes us equal and yet different, to participate, to value each one of us and understand diversity as an element for enrichment. The keys for an inclusive leisure in the context of a leisure understood as human experience and human right force us to develop a flexible and inclusive environment in which we can all fit, and in which there is a balance and harmony between social and individual needs.
Thus, as a result of the study on the leisure of youth with disabilities in the Basque Country, the research team has designed and defined an intervention strategy that rests on a social and institutional involvement and stimulates full inclusion in the leisure of young people. This project works on the inclusion as a rising value and as a feature of social innovation.

Leisure experiences and identities in a transforming society.

Human societies are not static entities, but dynamic realities in unfinished transformation. Changes in science and technology, the different economic, political, environmental and educational models  forge citizenship as well as the citizens´ relationships with time and space. The concept of leisure and its experience are no exception: societies, along centuries of history, have led to plural and diverse ways of understanding leisure in which different living expressions and manifestations coexist, constituting the heritage and identity or setting the creative capacity and industrial iniciative of society itself. The current scientific-technologic paradigm has fundamentally changed the rules of the game accelerating time and compressing space both at a physical and at a virtual, level (both at the direct, inmediate world and at the mediated, digitallized world), and providing massive -albeit not universal- access to it.  Physical and virtual transportation has radically changed our biographical landscapes, enabling the delocalization of spaces, not only of corporations, but of consumers and publics. The forces portrayed by Vicente Verdú  in the fiction capitalism (2003) and Richard Florida in the creative industries (2005) have shifted the centrality from the traditional modes of production towards experiencie, promoting a marketing of leisure experience which has also promoted an endargement of cultural diversity, a relocalization of consumption and an importand business concentration in the leisure industries.
Confronted with a process of homogeneization, cultural identities generate resistances (both active and reactive) or adapt themselves into sweetened, accesible forms of world culture. Audiences and publics learn (are forced to learn) to live in a multiple context, in a miscellaneous ecosystem formed by inmense minorities with  a myriad of identities and meanings which we are still unable to manage and articulate.
It is in this context of the pursuit of a leisure project able to transfer the successes of progress to the cohesion of citizens, neighborhoods and social groups, of the search of  a balance between external attractiveness and centrality on the one hand, and internal cohesion and development of citizenship on the other that this discussion starts:  how does leisure manifest itself in the context of emerging societies? And what are the challenges and opportunities of a changing identitary reality regarding transculturalism and multiple senses of belonging?

Media leisure and the transformation of experience: understanding the identities of an active receiver.

Mass media have an outstanding importance in shaping leisure experience in the current society. Several empirical researches show the media as a decisive factor in the construction of the cultural identity of receivers. This paper intends to clarify how the new technical possibilities of participation and co-creation affect the building of identities of an active subject of leisure. Media related leisure designed for mass audiences is a subject of sociological theory since decades ago. While most classical authors both at the left (Adorno and Horkheimer) and to the right (the so-called «theorists of decision») favored criticism and complaint, Walter Benjamin took the emerging phenomena in film, media and urban leisure into account to theorize on the transformation of experience. In this paper we will review his reflections on the different types of experiences related to different types of leisure and will then discuss their application on the current processes of identity-building. Benjamin´s assertion of the potential of emancipatory activity in the subject of media related leisure is finding confirmation today in authors such as Henry Jenkins, Stuart Hall, John Fiske or David Morley. Current research on cultural phenomena such as cross-media or web 2.0. shows an active receiver not only as the passive victim of consumerism but as a hunter always in search of experiences or as a fan belonging to and taking action through special communities. Understanding media audiences as more than passive receivers of content and studying the different ways in which media enable leisure subjects to build new forms of identity will help to address some of the main problems of leisure studies today.