Just Leisure? The ethics of recognition
The essays collected in this special issue were selected from approximately seventy presentations at the 1999 LSA annual conference hosted by Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education. The conference title ‘Just Leisure’ and indicative themes, ‘Ethics, Equity and Professional Development’, sought to embrace the diversity of leisure scholarship and research whilst inviting focus on the broadest conception of ethics as both philosophical and social scientic reections on the nature of good and meaningful living. This rather open-textured conceptualization of ‘ethics’ stands in stark contrast to its commonly used would-be synonym: ‘morality’. Importantly, however, the distinction is not merely terminological, and the conscious shift in language itself reects new trends in philosophy and the social sciences and, indeed, their relations. For the greater part of modernity, morality has been understood to refer to that range of right conduct which is best expressed in the form of rational-universal, actionguiding, rules that are to be applied impartially across age, class, gender or geography. The waning of the forces of modernism has witnessed in ethics, as in western culture, a loosening of condence in the universal-rational axis and a growing appreciation of cultural diversity. The local and the particular, the different, the other, are the object of focus in reections on the living of full and valuable lives of young and old, rich and poor, citizen and consumer, to which leisure, howsoever conceived, makes a critical contribution. Cara Aitchison relocates the growing dissatisfaction with the theoretical bases of leisure studies research and scholarship with a lack of receptivity to intellectual currents in the ‘parent’ disciplines in general, and with poststructuralist discourse in particular. Her advocacy of the rich possibilities of postructuralism, postcolonialism and feminism is at the same time a strong disavowal of universalizing or totalizing theories with respect to gender and heterosexuality. Her account of ‘othering’ draws attention to the ease with which women are subsumed under a universal account dominated by a parochial Western and colonial tokenism. Further evidence of the power of marginalizing misdescription is to be found in Chas Critcher’s critique of social reactions to Ecstasy and rave culture. He charts the course of development of the forms of music, drugs and dance that comprise rave culture from early variations in the eighties to the more sanitized and regulated clubbing version of the nineties. In reconstructing the negative reactions of media government and police, his intellectual diagnosis of this issue is to be found in the triplex of moral panics, theories of risk and the enthographies of ‘clubbing’ youth culture. Nevertheless, Critcher does not champion the need for new perspectivism, but rather a recognition that understanding youth culture and leisure will require modied tools if we are to properly understand this recent phenomenon not as mere hedonism but as a particularly expressive and vitalized form of identity-construction. Leisure Studies 19 (2000) 125–126