We are pleased to announce Brett Lashua as the keynote speaker for the 24th Annual Graduate Leisure Research Symposium.
Professor Brett Lashua is a Senior Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University. His interdisciplinary interests span leisure, popular music, cultural studies, cultural geographies, history, sociology and sport. He studied initially at Kent State University (BA History; MA Recreation) before his doctoral work at the University of Alberta with Prof Karen Fox. He took up postdoctoral research positions in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University and then the Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool. At Leeds Beckett University since 2009, he was course leader for the MA Leisure, Sport and Culture course (2011-2016) and currently teaches across courses including BA Entertainment Management, BA Sport and Social Sciences, and BA Music Performance and Production. He is the coordinator for the Leisure and Cultural Identities stream in the Centre for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) within the Research Institute for Sport, Physical Activity and Leisure.
Brett’s research crosses boundaries of leisure, youth cultures and cities. He has written on hip-hop, documentary filmmaking, popular music heritage, urban regeneration, pop-up cinema, youth transitions, Young Adult fiction, and zombie cultural geographies. These foci are underscored by interests in arts-based, creative and collaborative ethnographic methods including music-making, cultural mapping, soundwalks and soundscapes, documentary filmmaking, and transmedia storytelling.
His most recent book (co-edited with Karl Spracklen and Stephen Wagg) was Sounds and the City: Music, Place and Globalization (2014), and he is working now on the Palgrave Handbook of Leisure Theory (with Karl Spracklen, Erin Sharpe, and Spencer Swain). He is an Associate Editor for Leisure/Loisir and Leisure Sciences. Brett’s current research includes a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded study of youth sport and neighbourhood stigma (with Erin Sharpe and Cathy van Ingen, Brock University), NHS-funded research into youth community dance in Leeds (with Beccy Watson and Pip Trevorrow, Leeds Beckett University), and a university research cluster titled “Creativity, Protest and the City” (with Ian Lomand, Lynne Hibberd and Zoe Thompson, Leeds Beckett University). As these projects indicate, above all, he values interdisciplinary collaborative scholarship with critical leisure studies at its heart.
We are looking forward to having him present some of his research and his research interests at this year’s symposium presented by the Graduate Association for Recreation and Leisure Studies (GARLS).