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The Polluted Leisure Project

Dr Clifton Evers and James Davoll lead this project that is addressing the question: how can we better understand and respond to assemblages of pollution and leisure?

Many leisure enthusiasts think, feel, and act with the rhythms, flows, surges, and throbbing of pollution.

The concept ‘polluted leisure’ describes the embodied, sensorial, emotional, intellectual, spatial, and technological emergence of pollution–material and social; harmful and non-harmful; actual and perceived–assembling with leisure. Leisure does not simply result in pollution. In fact, pollution shapes and enables leisure e.g. equipment and access.

Pollution is not just an object but an active agent. This is the age of pollution. We take an ecological approach to pollution that troubles any assumed distinctions between the artificial and natural. Polluted leisure undermines humanism by revealing how world(s) are not just willed by us.

Any response to our current catastrophic situation is going to have to involve a radical shift in our terms of engagement with more-than-human actors if we want to open up to alternative ethical and creative leisure futures coming forth.

We need to take seriously imagining and working through the ethical challenge of living-with pollution (it is not going away any time soon) and being pollution ourselves as we pursue leisure.

This project is exploring polluted leisure internationally, including UK, Japan, Australia, Sweden, Spain, Ireland, Indonesia, and more.

Visit the project's website

This project has received funding from the Newcastle Institute for Creative Arts Practice.