Talk Title: When Love and Hate Collide: Poo and Zombies in Leisure and Leisure Studies
Abstract: Poo and zombies are loved and hated in society. We put manure on our gardens to help the plants of our leisure places grow while we ban human and dog poo from the public leisurescape. Our televised leisure is replete with zombies, the bad guys we love to see being killed. Leisure studies is also filled with research enslaved by zombie paradigms that dominate thinking and ways of being as researchers. The result is research outputs that smell of roses or resemble something that is a shade of brown and slightly squishy depending on your perspective.
This presentation provides a critical discussion of the position of poo and zombies in leisure and leisure studies. It questions whether they should be loved more or removed from the scene. The presentation examines how poo and zombies, and our views of them, enable and bar access to leisure and leisure studies. It questions what roles our view of both play in discrimination in leisure as phenomenon and field of inquiry. Should we embrace poo, or should we cast it into the fiery pits of hell? Should we give slavish devotion to zombie paradigms or slay them like a movie hero? If we remove the poo and kill the zombies and their paradigms what happens then?
This lecture is offered in person.
Lecture and award presentation will take place in Sun Life Auditorium - Lyle S. Hallman Institute (LHS) 1621, starting at 2:00 p.m. We will conclude with a short reception in the adjacent Fireplace Lounge with refreshments.
The Shaw-Mannell Lecture is funded by the Lyle S. Hallman Professorial Endowment.
Speaker Bio
Neil Carr is a Professor at the University of Otago/Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, New Zealand/Aotearoa. Neil’s work is grounded in notions of power, welfare, wellbeing and rights. He has explored these within the contexts of children and families, animals and sex, utilising the lenses of leisure and tourism to do so. The brains behind all of this, his dogs, are only stymied by their lack of opposable thumbs, which give them the ideal excuse to laze around for most of the day.