The Polluted Leisure Project
Dr Clifton Evers and James Davoll lead this project that is addressing the question: how can we better understand and respond to assemblages of pollution and leisure?
Many leisure enthusiasts think, feel, and act with the rhythms, flows, surges, and throbbing of pollution.
The concept ‘polluted leisure’ describes the embodied, sensorial, emotional, intellectual, spatial, and technological emergence of pollution–material and social; harmful and non-harmful; actual and perceived–assembling with leisure. Leisure does not simply result in pollution. In fact, pollution shapes and enables leisure e.g. equipment and access.
Pollution is not just an object but an active agent. This is the age of pollution. We take an ecological approach to pollution that troubles any assumed distinctions between the artificial and natural. Polluted leisure undermines humanism by revealing how world(s) are not just willed by us.
Any response to our current catastrophic situation is going to have to involve a radical shift in our terms of engagement with more-than-human actors if we want to open up to alternative ethical and creative leisure futures coming forth.
We need to take seriously imagining and working through the ethical challenge of living-with pollution (it is not going away any time soon) and being pollution ourselves as we pursue leisure.
This project is exploring polluted leisure internationally, including UK, Japan, Australia, Sweden, Spain, Ireland, Indonesia, and more.
This project has received funding from the Newcastle Institute for Creative Arts Practice.
Recent Outputs
Evers, C. (2019). 'Polluted Leisure in the AnthropOcean'. Paper presented at Congresso da Associação Portuguesa de Antropologia, University of Lisbon, June 4-7.
Evers, C. & Davoll, J. (2019) A Toxic Love Affair. Official selection. Ethnografilm festival, Paris, April 17-20.
Evers C, Davoll J. A Toxic Love Affair: Polluted Leisure in 'Blue Spaces'. Live Performance. ANTHROPOCEAN, IMAGINAIRES OCÉANIQUES. 2018. Paris: Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
Evers, C. (In press) Polluted Leisure. Leisure Sciences
Davoll, J. & Evers, C. (2018). A Toxic Love Affair: Polluted leisure in blue spaces. Exhibition. Ex Libris Gallery, Newcastle University, 21 September to 6 October.
Evers, C. & Davoll, J. (2018). Far from Heaven. Short Film.
Davoll, J. & Evers, C. (2018) A Toxic Love Affair. Short Film.
Doering, A., Evers, C., & Davoll, J. (2018). Life and polluted leisure in the wake of disaster: Living with Fukushima’s “polluted” sea. Paper presented at the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) of the UK and Commonwealth Conference. ASA18 Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination: Re-creating Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK, September 18-21.
Evers, C., and Davoll, J. (2017). Polluted Leisure and A Politics of Care. Paper presented at Sustaining the Seas Conference. University of Sydney, Australia, December 11-13.
Evers, C. (2017). Surfers and Sustaining the Seas. Sydney University environment Institute.
Evers, C., Davoll, J., and Doering, A. (2017). Polluted Leisure: Fieldwork in Fukushima. Zine.