ABSTRACT
It is a widely held view in the study of leisure that certain spaces and places matter to people, and that personal bonds commonly develop between people, places and activities, taking on an identity of their own (Stedman, 2003; Hammitt et al., 2004). Serious leisure is a concept used to describe the nature of involvement in leisure activities that are sufficiently substantial and interesting in nature for the participant to find a career there, acquiring and expressing a combination of its special qualities, skills, knowledge and experience (Stebbins, 2007b). Serious leisure participants may develop a strong attachment to their chosen pursuits. However, to what extent the leisure setting mitigates serious leisure involvement has received little scholarly attention. To this end, the chapter builds upon research undertaken by Elkington (2010, 2011) exploring the complex phenomenology of individuals’ experiences of flow in amateur acting. Flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1992) is a person–environment interaction theory in which optimal, flow, experience is triggered by a good fit between a person’s skills in an activity and the challenges afforded by that activity; this creates a very positive state of consciousness and leads to deeply enjoyable and intrinsically motivating experience. The chapter draws together the fields of Leisure Studies, Human Geography and Environmental Psychology, to examine, for the first time, the intersection of time, activity, state-of-mind, and meanings of space and place as distinct and yet interrelated dimensions of the serious leisure experience – as it happens.
