Dr Katherine Harrison

This editorial sets the scene for this special issue by unpacking the concept of ‘lockdown leisure’ as closely linked with the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic which spread globally in early 2020 and throughout 2021 and 2022. It provides a snapshot of the parameters of lockdown leisure, outlines the separate articles in this special issue, and considers the medium-to-long term implications of the pandemic for leisure studies. By incorporating perspectives from a plethora of academic disciplines, the special issue advances our understanding of the social, spatial and cultural impacts of the various lockdowns on leisure and our lives more broadly.

This editorial sets the scene for this special issue by unpacking the concept of ‘lockdown leisure’ as closely linked with the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic which spread globally in early 2020 and throughout 2021 and 2022. It provides a snapshot of the parameters of lockdown leisure, outlines the separate articles in this special issue, and considers the medium-to-long term implications of the pandemic for leisure studies. By incorporating perspectives from a plethora of academic disciplines, the special issue advances our understanding of the social, spatial and cultural impacts of the various lockdowns on leisure and our lives more broadly.

Introducing a broad range of innovative and creative qualitative methods, this accessible book shows you how to use them in research project while providing straightforward advice on how to approach every step of the process; from planning ...

This article outlines the methodological innovations generated in a study of knitting and femininity in Britain. The study utilised ‘knit “n” natter’ focus groups during which female participants were encouraged to knit and talk. The research design encompassed a traditionally undervalued form of domestic ‘women’s work’ to recognise the creative skills of female practitioners. ‘Knit “n” natter’ is a fruitful feminist research method in relation to its capitalisation on female participants’ creativity, its disruption of expertise and its feminisation of academic space. The method challenges patriarchal conventions of knowledge production and gendered power relations in research, but it also reproduces problematic constructions of gender, which are acknowledged. The study contributes to a growing body of work on creative participatory methods and finds that the ‘knit “n” natter’ format has utility beyond investigations of crafting and may be used productively in other contexts where in-depth research with women is desirable.

New discourses of craft construct knitting as young, hip, socially networked and politically conscious and the experiences of knitters who do not fit into this formulation are marginalised. 7.3 million people in Britain knit; the vast majority are women in their mid-thirties and older. Yet popular media accounts of ‘new knitting’ mobilise the derogatory figure of the ‘grandma’ to repudiate knitters who are seen not to properly instantiate contemporary femininity. Although this derision accrues particularly to older women, knitters of all ages can be similarly dismissed. Knitting is thus a site of struggle around new formations of gender in postfeminist culture in which some women fall short. This study uses original qualitative data from focus groups with 15 adult knitters in North-west England and North Wales to give voice to women who do not identify with ‘new knitting’ practices and primarily pursue their hobby in more conventional contexts. The article finds that traditional domestic craft practices continue to play a significant role, particularly in older women’s leisure, and that ‘new knitting’ is alienating for some practitioners. While the article concludes that twenty-first century discourses of craft have devalued established knitting practices, it also indicates that these are useful sources of critique of hipster capitalist postfeminist culture.

An edited book chapter discussing the role of fashion and style in the social construction of deviance.

Computer-generated imagery (CGI) of Earth published online by the private space industry, or ‘NewSpace’, produces understandings of a failing planet to justify the commercialisation of space and terrestrial extractivism. Drawing on the iconic blue-marble genre of 20th-century NASA Earth photography and more recent digital globe imagery linked to modelling and spectacularising climate crisis, NewSpace CGI contributes to an emergent ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ – a collectively held technology-driven vision of the future with practical applications – that anticipates departure from Earth for some by allowing for disaster capitalism on a planetary scale. Semiotic analysis of a sample of images obtained from the Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic websites in 2019-20 identified three representational themes that reconstruct Earth as anachronistic and inhospitable: a parting perspective in which Earth is depicted as a point of departure; Earth as incidental to futuristic space technologies; compulsory ultrablue colouration that evokes an untenably pristine environment. Together, these formal and stylistic elements constitute a new convention for Earth representation common across the NewSpace sector that crystallises a broader shift in the ontological status of Earth in the context of 21st-century climate crisis, from home planet – a place of return – to failing planet of origin that must inevitably be left behind. The research makes a novel contribution to the understanding of sociotechnical imaginaries by showing how detailed semiotic analysis of corporate imagery provides useful insights into how they emerge and whose imaginaries matter.

Pornography is no longer considered to be a single, homogenous ‘thing’. Nor are debates about pornography limited to the reductive anti-porn versus anti-censorship controversies of the mid-twentieth century. Whether we like it or not, pornography today is out in the open, from the ubiquity of porn produced and consumed via the Internet to the mainstreaming of porn aesthetics and practices into mass media and everyday life. Pornography is therefore of central concern to social scientific, arts and humanities research that focuses on sexual freedoms and oppressions, empowerment, gender, feminism and postfeminism, queer identities, normative and non-normative bodies, politics and more. This book conceives of pornographies in the plural and its twelve chapters engage directly with porn across a range of media and from a variety of critical perspectives. From the conceptual importance of pornography in the feminist ‘sex wars’ to porn produced for female and/ or queer sexual pleasure, via examinations of vaginal performance artists, fetish clinics, sexperts, amputee porn, barebacking, tattoos and Japanese erotica, this book illuminates the many ways in which pornographies may be understood in scholarship today.

It is expected that the Covid-19 lockdown will have increased physical inactivity with negative impacts for older people, who are at greater risk of health complications from the virus. This paper draws on customer evaluation questionnaire of a Pilates class aimed at people aged over 50 years old, which transitioned from a studio setting to online classes via Zoom at the start of the lockdown in England. The paper aims to (i) evaluate the shift of exercise services to online and (ii) examine how engagement with online services has influenced people’s reaction to Covid-19 and unprecedented confinement to their homes. Our analysis shows that experiences of exercise in the home are dependent on prior exercise engagement, particularly a sense of progress and competency in exercise movements, trust in the instructor and socio-economic privileges that enable participants to love and appreciate their homes. This paper argues that online classes have had positive impact on participants’ ability to cope with lockdown: routine, structure and being seen by others all proved important well-being aspects.

Representations of place and space in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) are under-researched, contributing to neglect of spatial stigma in austerity culture. In this paper, we combine agnotology – the study of manufactured ignorance – with visual grammar methods to examine Channel 5’s Britain’s Benefit Blackspots (2017) to address why FWT is spatially significant. We argue that televisual representations of the abject ‘welfare claimant’ in Britain have a spatial dimension, evident in repeated camera shots of derelict, deindustrialised, litter-strewn outside spaces and large sofas, overflowing ashtrays and dusty corners inside homes. We conclude that FWT’s representations serve two functions: firstly, they obscure the spatial inequalities inherent in austerity policies by reducing social problems to constructed social types and their places and ways of living and, secondly, they enable sets of socio-spatial assumptions that become unquestioned ways of reading and understanding disadvantaged and disadvantagised spaces of residence.

Editing techniques used in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) in the UK undermine narratives of hardship and structural inequality in representations of the living places of welfare claimants. This research identifies the affects of a televisual syntax – or ‘visual grammar’ – of spatial stigma in FWT. Using original data generated in a study of Channel 5’s documentary series On Benefits (2015-19), we conduct a Visual Grammar Analysis to argue that cutaway editing, which inserts camera shots of toilets, canine excrement and fly-tipping into programmes, undermines potentially sympathetic representations of poverty communicated via narrator voiceovers and/or verbal testimonies of participants. Our findings show that cutaway editing is a significant feature in the production of On Benefits and is oppositional to the articulated narrative. The research concludes that cutaway editing in FWT generates disgust towards the living places of benefits claimants, which is productive of a powerful visual grammar of spatial stigma

Media representations of fat and weight play a central role in the circulation of weight stigma. However, the production practices involved have received little attention. This paper focuses on the editing techniques deployed in a UK reality television documentary series, On Benefits. Our analysis of cutaway shots suggests a quantitative and qualitative difference between an episode featuring “‘obese”’ people claiming welfare, compared to the rest in our sample. We examine the cutaways to show how weight stigma intersects with welfare stigma on the grounds of self-control. We conclude that images of bodies, food, and medical aides mobilize weight stigma to overdetermine welfare claimants as underserving while casting suspicion about the purpose of State welfare in the UK.