Seminars

In this seminar Clifton Evers explored the relationships between men, masculinity, blue spaces (sea/ocean) and polluted leisure. He argued that leisure now involves becoming-with pollution. His focus was on how men are negotiating and adapting to this circumstance through risk-taking and ambivalence, particularly in post-industrial communities (north-east England) and those on the front line of environmental disaster (Fukushima, Japan). Clifton traced the history these men have with industrial pollutions and then discussed how an embodiment of industrial pollutions informs doing leisure—surfing, fishing, swimming—at these same sites. The study proceeded through a more-than-human paradigm to better articulate what pollutions do. The seminar also involved explaining how creative research methods can effectively elicit the role of the nonhuman, emotional complexity, and unspoken uncertainties of men who do polluted leisure. The seminar concluded by discussing Clifton’s short film Polluted Leisure (2019) and by arguing that the busyness of pollutions complicates patriarchal leisure discourses men employ and that have the effect of continuing to bifurcate nature and society, natural and artificial, subject and object that in turn shape environmental politics, sustainability efforts, and notions of wellbeing.