Leisure activism and engaged ethnography: heterogeneous voices and the urban palimpsest

ABSTRACT

Studying the conflictualities between leisure activism, understood as participation in events of dissent as a nonwork-based activity, and those tasked with ‘maintaining order’, requires techniques that can work with diverse voices and contesting world views. However, many of the methods familiar to us in the social sciences risk reinforcing relationships of power that can undermine such inquiry. Drawing on the conceptual work of scholars from the global south and the global north, we examine approaches to protests as event, the construction of urban space and the performativity of violence, in two democracies: Brazil and the UK. From that we were led to conclude such research requires a less canonical approach. It is through the adoption of a more engaged ethnography, one that establishes horizontal relations between researchers and participants that are drawn from backgrounds reflecting such conflictualities, combined with an understanding of the process of research as more like that of an event, that the diversity of the heterogeneous voices associated with dissent, within an urban palimpsest, can be heard.

KEYWORDS: Leisure activism, protest, researcher/participant collaboration, global south, engaged research