The Fan Studies Network

CALL FOR CHAPTERS: Digital Leisure Cultures: Critical Perspectives (Routledge)

Following the 2014 Leisure Studies Association annual conference – hosted at the University of the West of Scotland (UWS), Professor David McGillivray, Professor Gayle McPherson and Dr Sandro Carnicelli are co-editing an edited collection on Digital Leisure Cultures.

The collection considers what the digital age means for our understandings of leisure culture in the 21st century, placing emphasis on the changing nature of leisure cultures brought about, intensified, or accelerated in a digital world. The digital turn in leisure has opened up a vast array of new opportunities to play, learn, participate and be entertained – opportunities that have transformed what we recognise as leisure pastimes and activities. People communicate with each other in different ways, more intensively and at greater speed. Technological advances enable people to create and distribute music, videos, images and ideas on a handheld device at the touch of a button or swipe of a touchscreen (Solis, 2012). Offering critical consideration of the ‘costs’ associated with digital leisure cultures on individuals – as well as organisations and societies – the book offers vital intervention into debates within Leisure Studies (including sport, tourism, and events sectors) about the extent to which the digital turn has led to something wholly positive. Does it free us up from the limits of our analogue lives or are we have simply caught up in a web of surveillance, control and corporately controlled leisure – the darker side of digital?

Proposed structure

The book will explore a range of conceptual issues brought to the fore by the digital turn using leisure culture case studies. Each chapter should detail its theoretical trajectory and provide at least one case study exemplar that will explain its relevance for a specified leisure culture (e.g. sport, event, music, tourism, culture).  The book will be divided into three main parts:

Producing digital leisure cultures
Consuming digital leisure cultures
Regulating digital leisure cultures

Each part will be supplemented with a series of sub-themes (or topics), which could include (but are not restricted to):

Resistance
Surveillance
Acceleration
Control
Ownership
Privacy
Commodification and commercialization
Digital divides
Morality and ethics
Moral panics
Risk
Fandom
Health and the body
Social media and digital storytelling
Experiences 

Submission guidelines

We are looking to form a proposal for a book of approximately 12-16 chapters and authors are invited to submit abstracts of no more than 350 words (excluding indicative references) in a Word document to be emailed to David McGillivray david.mcgillivray@uws.ac.uk by Friday 28th November, 2014.

Abstracts should include the following information:
Proposed article title
Proposed author names and affiliations
Part (production, consumption, regulation) and theme being addressed
Purpose/aim of the chapter
Principal body of literature/theoretical framework
Indicative case study
Key findings/conclusions
Some key dates (estimations)

Submission of abstracts:

Friday 28th November 2014

Submission of full chapters (pending approval of proposal): March 2015

Publication: end of 2015

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