Epistemological encounters: unpacking methodological insights
The articles in this collection present an intriguing range of epistemological and methodological approaches. Since epistemology is concerned with the study of knowledge – or how we know what we know (about leisure and food) – these papers can be read in terms of what they offer both to our current ability to know leisure through food and food through leisure and to future researchers interested pursuing similar lines of inquiry.
In “‘Just’ desserts: an interpretive analysis of sports nutrition marketing,” Joylin Namie and Russell Warne take a critical interpretivist stance as they assess marketing media and the social construction of food and drink items, which are marketed as sport nutrition products (albeit comprised of salt, sugar and carbohydrates) and by association as healthy snacks for athletes and non-athletes alike. The authors use interpretive text analysis to evaluate a variety of marketing materials (product packages, websites and commercials) and concentrate their discussion on those sports nutrition products most closely linked to athletic success.
Namie and Warne then use conceptual tools from critical sociology to consider their findings, and what follows is a revealing and complex assessment of marketing efforts, which aim to convince consumers that eating nutrition-poor snacks makes them more like athletes (and thereby healthier). This project offers future researchers the tools not just to ask and assess how food is marketed to consumers for use in leisure but also to investigate the very processes of the social construction of food (and healthy food) more broadly. Leisure here is positioned as the context for food consumption.
In “Promoting sustainable food and food citizenship through an adult education leisure experience,” Alan Warner, Edith Callaghan and Cate de Vreede use an action research approach, also broadly critical interpretivist, to engender learning about food and sustainability in their community in Nova Scotia, Canada. Their project invited volunteers to host a sustainable meal in their homes for friends and was designed using tools to foster critical reflection and dialogue in the hopes of spurring a commitment to future food citizenship. Using participant observation, surveys and qualitative interviews, the authors assess the impact of these meals on participants and use their results to engage in a wide-ranging discussion about the role of radical adult education in fostering citizenship and social change through food experiences. Warner, Callaghan and de Vreede actively engage the leisure context in their research and clearly articulate leisure as a space where reflection on the issues that affect us all can be fostered and transformed into meaningful actions for social change.
In “Epitomizing the ‘other’ in ethnic eatertainment experiences,” Deepak Chhabra, Woojin Lee and Shengnan Zhao take us into the construction of authenticity as demonstrated in so-called ethnic restaurants. Arguably closer to a post-positivist approach than the other papers in this issue, the authors use a variety of methods: including netnography to examine online reviews by patrons of five popular Indian restaurants in a metropolitan area of Arizona, in the United States; an evaluation of marketing materials of these restaurants; and interviews with owners. The goal of the research is to assess customer perceptions of authenticity in the context of these five restaurants as well as the efforts of restaurant owners to project some kind of authentic eating experience. Chhabra, Woojin and Zhao’s work helps us to generate a deeper understanding of the intersection of food and leisure in particular contexts as they argue restaurant eating is a complex composite of service, expectation and experience.
Three papers situate the intersection of food and leisure in community gardens. In “Gardening in green space for environmental justice: food security, leisure and social capital” Rob Porter and Heather McIlvaine-Newsad use ethnographic methods such as participant observation, journaling, focus groups and semi-structured interviews to better understand people’s access to community gardens in rural settings. Working from an environmental justice perspective, the authors find that leisure is the crucial nexus of the garden’s success, and that access to green space for growing food provides both food security and leisure opportunities while also creating social capital among new migrants from the city and long-time rural residents. This work sets the stage for future community garden research, which is avowedly both critical and constructionist and as such actively encourages future researchers to ask essential questions about the growing prevalence of community gardens and the role they (might) play in social change.
Rudy Dunlap, Justin Harmon and Gerard Kyle move the intersection of food and leisure to an urban setting in “Growing in place: the interplay of urban agriculture and place sentiment.” Drawing on social constructivist understandings of place, the authors explore how becoming involved in agricultural activities contributes to shaping the sentiment and meaning people ascribe to places in the urban landscape. They used a qualitative approach that encompassed participant observation and semi-structured interviews and reveal two dimensions by which participants constructed place meanings: through physical interactions and social interactions. Dunlap et al. thereby broaden and deepen the current scholarly conversation regarding leisure and community gardens as they position their discussion within the more fertile aspects of the social construction of place debates. By growing food – in place – people are cultivating more than vegetables. The authors argue that they also cultivate social capital, meaning and sentiment anchored in place in an era of alienating placelessness.
In “Tending to the soil: autobiographical narrative inquiry of gardening,” Michael Dubnewick, Karen Fox and Jean Clandinin employ autobiographical narrative inquiry to investigate the intersection of food and leisure in a series of gardens frequented by Dubnewick. Unlike more linear, temporal and thematic forms of narrative inquiry, their approach sheds light on the complex nature of daily gardening practices and “highlights multiple threads while emphasizing the phenomenon of experience as stories always in the making.” In this way, they hope to disrupt the dominant discourse of gardening as community development in leisure studies with alternative stories from the multiple experiences of one of the authors in dialogue with the other two, who form a response community. As a result, they came to understand that community is always in process and learned how to “love” in Lugones’ terms, placing themselves alongside other stories and turning a loving gaze on hidden stories. In addition, the authors learned about the importance of creating multiple stories in order to see both dominant and marginal ones, so that “the power, with its benefits and harms, of leisure in all its forms can be seen and understood.”
