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For the American Anthropological Association meetings, Nov 14-18, 2012: Borders of the everyday: Dynamics of belonging through leisure and participation in public spaces Lived spaces are crisscrossed with borders, both physical and social. Public spaces are nominally accessible to any public, but in practice become dominated by certain publics. These dominations may be forceful, as in policed gang territories, Occupy movements, or stamping out right-of-way on British footpaths; or subtle, as in childrens’ sports played on disused fields, blasting music in a public park, or groups of clubgoers taking up the sidewalk during night-time escapades. This session focuses on these more subtle and intangible borderings. Specifically, we seek papers that empirically investigate how borders and belongings emerge and are negotiated through practices of leisure in public spaces. We take leisure practices as a central and constitutive part of everyday life, and therefore informative to how groups are created through networks of belonging. By targeting leisure practices in public space, we invite a large variety of material: shopping and consumption practices; night-time entertainment; use of designated public parks, commons, or waterways; private outdoor spaces used for leisure purposes; and other possible suggestions. Incorporating this wide scope of leisure, we want to elicit how the practices of individuals doing such leisure contributes to creating borders of belonging and not-belonging that tend to be, following Saldanha’s (2007) vocabulary, viscous – strongly bonded, yet mobile and fluid. We seek contributions that are based on empirically grounded study, using any applicable methods (ethnography, qualitative GIS, visual, etc), that can inform this process of creating intangible, fluid borders in public spaces through leisure practices. *Saldanha, Arun. 2007. Psychedelic White. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ----Please submit abstracts of 250 words to both Lauren Wagner ([log in to unmask]) and Karin Peters ([log in to unmask]) by March 29th, 2012.---- Lauren Wagner Cultural Geography Wageningen University www.geo.wur.nl T: +31 (0) 31 48 25 07 Postal address: Postbus 47 6700 AA Wageningen