Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
LEISURE STUDIES, cilt.0, ss.1-18, 2025 (SSCI)
The value that policymakers and the community assign to children’s leisure spaces decreases significantly, transforming these spaces into urban grey areas. Meanwhile, concerns regarding the safety of children in leisure spaces increase. These problems are more complex among children from marginalised communities. In this post-qualitative inquiry, we analysed the everyday, leisure experiences of Roma children from a safety perspective. We adopted a post-qualitative inquiry to explore non-human elements and the relationship between spaces, people and materials from a post-structuralist perspective. We gathered information through photovoice techniques, discussion circles and narratives by Roma children for three months in the northwest of Türkiye. Our study highlights how leisure spaces are interlinked with crime scenes and pollution. We argue that children in polluted leisure spaces manage or normalise physical unsafety to some extent. However, they find it challenging to deal with emotional unsafety, which is influenced by adult-related factors, such as drug-trafficking. In this inquiry, we explore the theoretical and practical implications of leisure in polluted environments as perceived by Roma children. Greyness, both symbolic and material, manifests here through the lenses of social and environmental ambiguities, contradictions and the paradoxes that Roma children experience as urban leisure in their neighbourhoods.