Walking and Leisure

This book critically examines walking as a socially and politically situated leisure practice, exploring how movement through urban and rural spaces is shaped by broader structures of power and inequality. While walking is often framed as a leisure activity with physical and mental health benefits, this book foregrounds its role as an embodied practice deeply influenced by intersecting factors such as class, race, gender, age and disability. Drawing on interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives and innovative methodological approaches, the chapters present empirically rich case studies from diverse global contexts-including the UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hong Kong and Thailand. These studies range from pandemic walking and app-guided navigation to the experiences of mothers, disabled individuals, older adults, people with cancer, black women and those walking with animals. Together, they illuminate how walking practices negotiate space, place, identity and belonging, while also exposing spatial exclusions and embodied constraints. Walking and Leisure offers a significant contribution to the sociology of leisure, human geography, cultural studies and critical disability studies. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students engaged in research on mobility, embodiment and the everyday politics of place and space.

Miriam Snellgrove is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her research explores the everyday politics and pleasures of leisure-particularly walking, swimming and the mindsport bridge-through qualitative methodologies including ethnography, poetry, diaries and interviews. She is particularly interested in collaborative research that foregrounds the lived experiences of participants and examines how leisure intersects with social inequalities. Her work contributes to wider discussions on methodological innovation and the sociological significance of everyday leisure.

Introduction: Leisurely Walking Part I: Mobilities 1. Where is the Leisure When Walking with a Baby?: Unruly and Leaky Bodies 2. Disabled Mobilities and Critical Embodied Entanglements in the Park: Walk this Way 3. The Queer Politics of Walking with Digital Technologies 4. Race, Nature, and Historical Memory: Walking Hadrian's Wall 5. The Role of the Erotic in Black Women's Leisure Part II: Encounters 6. Walking with Cancer, Walking with my Father 7. Walking and Stopping Together in the Carceral Landscape of the Isle of Portland 8. Walking with a Cat: Feline Exercise as a Challenge to Established Norms in Urban Environments 9. Storying a Place through Walking and Alternative Map Making with Others 10. The Importance of Everyday Walking Routines for Ageing Well in Place Part III: Critical Engagements 11. Walking In the Spatial Order of Automobility 12. Creative Walking: Repetition, Rhythm and Respite in Pandemic Times 13. Reimagining the City Walking Tour to Stimulate a Critical Engagement with Place 14. Walking as a Socio-political Form of Transforming Civic Experience: Slippage of Leisure