Politically Engaged Leisure: The Political Participation of Young People in Contemporary Britain beyond the Serious Leisure Model

Abstract

Young people in Britain have been affected directly by a host of policies from the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government (2010-2015) and then the Conservative government since 2015. Notable youth policies within the context of austerity have included the increase in university tuition fees, the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) and student maintenance grants, the cuts to spending on higher education and the reduction of Youth Services. Young people have also been affected especially by the lack of affordable accommodation and mental health care, as well as high rate of youth unemployment compared to other age groups (Jones 2017). During the same period, the country has experienced a rise in political participation of young people: youth membership of all the main political parties has increased (Keen and Apostolova 2017; Pickard 2015) and youth-led protest has grown

Uses of Free Time by Young Adults in Arab Mediterranean Countries: Exposing and Addressing Boundary Issues in Leisure Studies

“…There is a powerful case for including political activities among the free time options of Arab Mediterranean youth given the prevalence of community politics among those on middle class life courses, and the role of protest politics in the region. Pickard (2017) has made a case for recognising politically engaged leisure as a super-serious kind of leisure among Western youth, while originally the contributors to Resistance Through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson, 1975), and more recently Dimou and Ilan (2018), have identified forms of proto-politics in numerous Western youth sub-cultures. How young people engage in politics is different, but arguably more important politically in the Arab Mediterranean region where young adults are larger proportions of the total populations, and where voting is less likely to change government policies in ways that affect the lives of people such as themselves than in relatively mature Western democracies.…”