Leisure consciousness and epistemic justice: reframing leisure as situated praxis in Latin America

Leisure research often operates within Eurocentric assumptions about free time, autonomy, and individual choice, while practices in the Global South are frequently treated as cultural variations rather than sources of theory. This research note introduces Leisure Consciousness as an interpretive approach for examining how communities negotiate the meanings and conditions of leisure within unequal social contexts. Drawing on critiques emerging from Sport-for-Development and engaging with Latin American scholarship on leisure, coloniality, and epistemic dependency, the paper adapts the political-pedagogical logic of the Sport Consciousness Model to leisure studies. Leisure Consciousness approaches leisure as a space where inequality may be interpreted, negotiated, and organized through community practices. Rather than assuming leisure to be inherently emancipatory, the paper examines the conditions under which leisure practices may become spaces of dialogue, spatial negotiation, and collective organization within unequal social realities.