The smell of polluted leisure in the Anthropocene: A qualitative arts-based approach to studying sport, eco-emotions, the senses, men, and the environment

Clifton Westly Evers^*

• Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

This paper explores eco-emotions and sensory experiences, particularly the sense of smell, of men engaging in sports while navigating pollution along an industrial coastline. Using sensory ethnography that includes experimental arts-based perfume workshops and smell walks, I make a case for bringing analysis of men and sport, the senses, and the environment into closer dialogue with eco-emotions, arguing that doing so has the potential to widen our understanding of men's embodied sporting lives and any associated role in environmental sports activism. Eco-emotions refer to emotional responses to environmental challenges, for example eco-hope and eco-anxiety in relation to climate change and pollution. The paper provides evidence of how men in a toxic community navigate eco-anxiety, precarious hope, and eco-disgust through 'polluted leisure' olfactory competencies alongside other practical skills that enable moments of pleasure while enduring a polycrisis. The working-class white men in the study demonstrate sophisticated sensory knowledge and complicated eco-emotional lives as they live with and adapt to pollution in ways that trouble any simple binary of activism and ignorance or apathy. The men perform intentional and unintentional mundane, daily, idiosyncratic, tactical, quiet, and intimate actions that add to forms of environmental sport activism that may be taken and paid attention to.