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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Clifton EversORCiD
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Over the past decade, I've conducted ethnographic research examining the intersection of pollution and leisure activities along the post-industrial coastline of North East England and other ‘blue spaces’. My concept of "polluted leisure" explores how pollution and leisure activities intertwine through physical, sensory, emotional, intellectual, spatial, and technological dimensions. This encompasses both material and social pollution, whether harmful or benign, real or perceived. Rather than viewing pollution as merely a byproduct of leisure activities, my research reveals how pollution actively shapes and enables leisure experiences. Through extensive fieldwork observing leisure/sport participants, I've documented both sensory and emotional responses to polluted environments through leisure. However, I've reached a critical juncture where I feel I must examine my own bodily experiences – understood as a dynamic process of more-than-human inter and intra-action. This self-examination will help me explore the crucial emotional and affective aspects of engaging with severely contaminated coastal areas, exemplified by sites like the aptly named Chemical Beach. I argue that understanding polluted leisure in the Anthropocene requires centring affective-emotional experiences. My personal engagement with these blue spaces has led to an unsettling sense of "making kin" with pollution as I try to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016). This process involves complex emotions: fear and shame around my privileged white male position alongside living in denial (Norgaard, 2011); joy in finding leisure/sport possibilities within "toxic nature"; pride in developing environmental awareness and amplifying affected communities' voices; and a toing-and-froing between paralysing eco-anxiety and "cruel optimism" (Berlant, 2011). Through an auto-ethnography, this article will explore the less examined affective-emotional dimensions of polluted leisure to better understand making kin with pollution during outdoor leisure/sport and what that might mean for the role of sport in promoting climate action.
Author(s): Evers C
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: 50th Leisure Studies Association Annual Conference 2025
Year of Conference: 2025
Online publication date: 10/07/2025
Acceptance date: 12/03/2025
Publisher: Leisure Studies Association
URL: https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/events/50th-leisure-studies-association-annual-conference/
Notes: Conference programme and Book of Abstracts available from: https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/12188/
