Community as Hyperobject: Exploring the 'Spectral Plains' of Leisure
Published in Leisure and its Communities: Rethinking Mutuality, Collective Expression, and Belonging in the New Century
Edited by Troy D. Glover and Erin K. Sharpe.
Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
With Dr. Jim Cherrington
Abstract
Although communities can be distinct and defined, helping to locate and orientate a particular identity, they can also be expansive, neither beginning nor ending in any particular temporal moment. Here, our relation to community is one that embodies us in both physical but also ‘spectral’ forms (Morton 2017). They exist in our pasts, yet communities can also be drawn around specific geographical co-ordinates. In short, as an analytical tool – in fact, as an understanding of reality – community remains a decidedly slippery and frustratingly paradoxical term (Blackshaw 2010). In view of such paradoxes, we seek to examine the relationship between community and leisure. Here we turn towards an understanding of community as ‘hyperobject’.