Book Description

This book takes up a range of factors affecting the relationship between community development and recreation: planning assumptions and structures, class and racial influences on engagement processes, grassroots approaches, critical consciousness through young adult literature, questions about the relationship between community and economic development, and issues of inclusion, social justice, and community empowerment. In a world of diversity and fluidity, the challenge for leisure/recreation practitioners and scholars becomes more complex and potentially exciting if we can become comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. The term "community development" in a globalized and diverse world is problematic and carries with it a history of colonialism, Western expansion and hegemony, and neo-liberal agendas in addition to being situated in a changing contentious world with nation-states and minority groups struggling over control. This volume initiates a discussion about the ways leisure, sport, and tourism might conceptualize the relationship with community development. The volume builds upon existing research and programs, extends or reframes theoretical approaches, questions, and posits alternative frameworks for playing with the intersection of community development, leisure, sport and tourism. Its strength and relevance comes from the authors' willingness to seriously and playfully explore the limits, implications, and variations of community development relevant for recreation and leisure studies as well as construct alternative spaces for leisure practices. Whether it is reconceiving planning as a "human arena" potentially facilitating how an individual comes to understand the self and communities, an exploration of how whiteness and privilege colour community development and recreation, conceiving of a compassionate pedagogy for community and recreation facilitation, or returning to young adult literature and storytelling for knowledge, this collection interweaves current theories, ethical frameworks, practices, and critiques relevant to recreation and leisure practitioners and scholars. Such a collection helps orient leisure practice and scholarship within larger international and North American currents of diversity, struggles over Indigenous rights and standing, economic and global agendas, political agendas that use leisure as power over or exclusion of others, the value of leisure beyond social and economic benefits, and the hegemonic commitment to an autonomous, self-initiating individual self. As the voices herein unfold spaces within dominant and status quo approaches in governments and academia, there are some voices yet to be heard.