The Liminal Leisure of Disadvantaged Young People in the UK Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The global COVID-19 pandemic has created, exposed and exacerbated inequalities and differences around access to—and experiences and representations of—the physical and virtual spaces of young people’s leisure cultures and practices. Drawing on longstanding themes of continuity and change in youth leisure scholarship, this paper contributes to our understandings of ‘liminal leisure’ as experienced by some young people in the UK before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. To do this, we place primary pre-pandemic research on disadvantaged young people’s leisure spaces and practices in dialogue with secondary data on lockdown and post-lockdown leisure. Subsequently, we argue that existing and emergent forms of youth ‘leisure liminality’ are best understood through the lens of intersectional disadvantages. Specifically, pre-existing intersectional disadvantages are being compounded by disruptions to youth leisure, as the upheaval of the pandemic continues to be differentially experienced. To understand this process, we deploy the concept of liminal leisure spaces used by Swaine et al Leisure Studies 37:4,440-451, (2018) in their ethnography of Khat-chewing among young British Somali urban youth ‘on the margins’. Similarly, our focus is on young people’s management and negotiation of substance use ‘risks’, harms and pleasures when in ‘private-in-public’ leisure spaces. We note that the UK government responses to the pandemic, such as national and regional lockdowns, meant that the leisure liminality of disadvantaged young people pre-pandemic became the experience of young people more generally, with for example the closure of night-time economies (NTEs). Yet despite some temporary convergence, intersectionally disadvantaged young people ‘at leisure’ have been subject to a particularly problematic confluence of criminalisation, exclusion and stigmatisation in COVID-19 times, which will most likely continue into the post-pandemic future.