Unlocking Leisure: Ethnography in Institutional Care based on Actor-Network Theory

Abstract Leisure practices can be viewed as hybrid networks of associations between humans and non-humans, as proposed by the Actor-Network Theory (ANT). We sought to investigate how children and adolescents in institutional care services construct leisure experiences through agencements, controversies, disputes, and negotiations. An ethnography based on ANT was conducted over 13 months. In institutional care services, leisure takes shape as practices of radical insurgency led by children and adolescents. Rules, objects, affects, documents, bodies, and spaces form unstable networks that make leisure possible in everyday institutional life. Leisure is materially and symbolically locked through institutional practices of social control. Nevertheless, the agency of children and adolescents creates cracks and opens gaps for lines of flight. By following the actor-network of leisure, this research contributes to expanding the analytical frameworks of leisure studies, repositioning leisure as a performative, situated practice traversed by disputes and advancing an original contribution to the theoretical foundations of the sociology of leisure by mobilizing Actor-Network Theory.