LEISURE, CULTURE AND TOURISM FOR SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

Brief description of research aims

The team’s study is based on a conception of knowledge as a comprehensive experience and basic right which highlights its contribution to human development in the personal, social, cultural, economic and environmental spheres. This research area contains four priority subjects which aim to give an interdisciplinary response to the main challenges posed by leisure today: Lifelong leisure experiences and sustainable creative leisure environments.
Leisure is a complex reality that must be approached from two broad, intersecting perspectives: the personal and experiential side, and the social and environmental side. Furthermore, other relevant issues that make up the approach of the "Leisure and Human Development" Research Group to the aforementioned areas include addressing the different actors (public sector, private sector and third sector) involved in the experience and management of the different areas of leisure (culture, tourism, sport and recreation), the implications of the practices for the different groups (children, young people, adults and the elderly or people with disabilities, among others), as well as the evaluation of the possible impacts of leisure experiences on the environment. All of the above are based on one cross-cutting aspect, social inclusion. This comprises an intervention principle as an essential tool to ensure the right to leisure and enable all citizens' participation of all citizens in successful and quality leisure experiences.

Research area 

 - Leisure, culture and tourism for social transformation.
- The scientific production of the "Leisure and Human Development" research group is focused on two main thematic sub-areas where social inclusion is a cross-cutting issue.
- In relation to the cross-cutting area of Social Inclusion, it should be pointed out that any intervention in the fields of leisure (culture, tourism, sport or recreation) should take on the social responsibility of the implications and consequences it generates for citizens.

Sub-area 1. Lifelong Leisure Experiences
Understanding leisure as a holistic phenomenon requires seeing it as a process that takes place throughout life, adopting different meanings, expressions, functions and experiences in each of the life stages. The dynamic evolution of leisure, which has been widely proven in scientific literature, confirms that a person's leisure habits are not isolated actions but expressions of a meaningful whole that forms each person's leisure itinerary.
It is important to take a longitudinal approach to study people from childhood to old age, and to analyse the leisure pathways that are built up in the different stages of life. All of the above is performed to foster better life conditions for people by proposing active, satisfactory, valuable and intergenerational leisure. Meaningful lifelong leisure has become an area to promote people's and communities' well-being. The current reality poses the challenge of new ways of governing leisure, and responding to citizens' needs.
Among the research team’s different areas of knowledge, two are outstanding. That which refers to leisure and youth development and the area centred on leisure and active satisfactory ageing, placing special attention on the cross-cutting area related to inclusion and social cohesion.

Subarea 2: Sustainable and Creative Leisure Environments Leisure Studies has always been concerned with the ways in which artistic experiences are produced and socialised, helping to understand how creativity contributes to human development and to personal and community development. However, concepts like “creativity” have been profoundly re-formulated in the last decade. They have exited the scope of art to become a source of inspiration in almost all fields and competences, both analogical and digital, which foster more interactive ways to understand social relationships.
This subarea works mainly on two deeply interconnected dimensions: the first one gives value to art as a substantive leisure experience, linked to the consolidation of cultural audiences and the development of emerging audiences and, ultimately, to the sustainable management of a cultural heritage that is no longer seen as something simply inherited, but as a social construction that increasingly encourages citizen participation. The second dimension ocuses on urban spaces regenerated through the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI), a cluster of sectors undergoing extraordinary dynamism, in which highly innovative creative processes merge with commercial positioning strategies on a more sustainable scale than that of traditional mass cultural industries.
This ability to attract specialist talent in sectors that contribute to socialising technological competences and imaginative production processes makes these creative sectors a high strategic value for the territories where they are based. This sub-area approaches the subject from an original perspective: the need to develop new methodologies to analyse the qualitative -and not just economic- impacts of the creative sectors on territories undergoing urban regeneration that are intended to be sustainable and supported by collaborative processes at the heart of which must be a critical and participatory concept of culture.
* Team recognised by the Basque Government