Negotiated Temporalities: Leisure, Time-Use and Everyday Life

Abstract

This chapter adopts a temporal lens to explore time issues in participating families vis-à-vis leisure. Although time is widely invoked in definitions of leisure, our understanding of the way time is subjectively perceived and utilised in and for leisure in racialised middle-class settings is thin on the ground. This chapter addresses this gap by exploring key manifestations of time and leisure in participation families which pivot around notion of busyness and family time, navigation of ‘screen-time’ in relation to children’s digital leisure, and ‘alone time’ as an instantiation of solitary leisure. Each of these axes illuminate the way race and class inflect experiences of time within families, and how opportunities for various genres of leisure are carved out in relation to each other. By theorising leisure within families as ‘negotiated temporalities’, this chapter pushes current debates on time, family life and children’s everyday geographies into new directions