Unlocking Leisure: Ethnography in Institutional Care based on Actor-Network Theory

Unlocking Leisure: Ethnography in Institutional Care based on Actor-Network Theory | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Research Article Unlocking Leisure: Ethnography in Institutional Care based on Actor-Network Theory Janaína Fontes, Clarissa Pinto Pizarro de Freitas, Adriane Vieira, and 1 more This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-7285109/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Published Journal Publication published 18 Feb, 2026 Read the published version in International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure → Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract Leisure practices can be viewed as hybrid networks of associations between humans and non-humans, as proposed by the Actor-Network Theory (ANT). We sought to investigate how children and adolescents in institutional care services construct leisure experiences through agencements, controversies, disputes, and negotiations. An ethnography based on ANT was conducted over 13 months. In institutional care services, leisure takes shape as practices of radical insurgency led by children and adolescents. Rules, objects, affects, documents, bodies, and spaces form unstable networks that make leisure possible in everyday institutional life. Leisure is materially and symbolically locked through institutional practices of social control. Nevertheless, the agency of children and adolescents creates cracks and opens gaps for lines of flight. By following the actor-network of leisure, this research contributes to expanding the analytical frameworks of leisure studies, repositioning leisure as a performative, situated practice traversed by disputes and advancing an original contribution to the theoretical foundations of the sociology of leisure by mobilizing Actor-Network Theory. leisure Actor-Network Theory agency institutional care childhood Figures Figure 1 Introduction Leisure in institutional care situations is understood as the effect of multiple associations between humans and non-humans, including institutional rules, objects, spaces, and affects. It is neither fixed nor isolated, but rather a dynamic, performative, and situated practice that is continually updated through everyday interactions and negotiations. With theoretical support from Actor-Network Theory, leisure practices can be understood as emerging through the performance of networks, characterized as hybrid, unstable, and shaped by disputes, controversies, agencements, and critical operations (Fontes, 2024). Studies on leisure have relied on psychosocial, functionalist, or configurational perspectives. Approaches such as those of Dumazedier (2014), Elias and Dunning (1992), as well as contemporary critical sociological contributions such as Rojek (2010), tend to conceive of leisure as a sphere separate from obligation, a “free” time opposed to work, or as a reflection of the cultural and social transformations of modernity. Although these contributions have been central, their reliance on dualisms, such as subject/object, structure/action, macro/micro, limits their ability to capture the relational and material complexity of leisure practices in highly regulated contexts such as institutional care. Actor-Network Theory (ANT), in this sense, represents a methodological and ontological shift. Instead of conceiving of leisure as a substantive domain or a stable analytical category, ANT allows it to be approached as a contingent effect of associations between humans and non-humans (Latour, 2012; Fenwick & Edwards, 2010; Sayes, 2014). This approach challenges the notion that human actors are the sole agents of action and highlights the agency distributed among objects, regulations, spaces, discourses, affects, and bodies. By proposing the notion of “leisure as an actor-network,” this research contributes conceptually to the field by shifting the analytical focus from defining leisure to describing its agencements. This allows us to understand how seemingly simple practices, such as playing in the courtyard or choosing a movie, are effects of complex and unstable networks, and not merely expressions of individual preferences or products of structural conditions. In this context, we observe the need to renew leisure studies to incorporate approaches that address its materialities, spatialities, and everyday politics (Byrne, 2024; Blackshaw, 2017; Veal, 2018). Accordingly, ANT offers an innovative lens for apprehending leisure in its procedural and performative dimension, enabling observation of how it is made and unmade amid disputes, crises, alliances, resistances, and practices of invention. This is especially relevant in contexts where its existence is intermittent, as is the case in institutional care services. Based on ANT, our interest in this investigation was to understand the leisure of children and adolescents in institutional care services. The aim was to observe the leisure practices of children and adolescents in institutional care services and to understand the associations surrounding this leisure. More specifically, we sought to describe how leisure is performed within the sphere of institutional care, the associations established around these practices, and to understand the agencies mobilized in the leisure of children and adolescents in Institutional Care situations. We therefore asked: What are the associations and controversies in leisure practices within the institutional care services of children and adolescents? Institutional care is a protective measure provided for in Article 101 of Brazilian Federal Law No. 8069 – the Statute of the Child and Adolescent. In the State of Rio Grande do Sul (RS), it is implemented by the Special Protection Foundation of RS ( Fundação de Proteção Especial - FPE). The measure does not involve deprivation of liberty, as the children and adolescents, having had their rights violated, are placed by court order in residential care services for a provisional period of up to 18 months, separated from their families. According to information from the Childhood and Youth Coordination of RS (CIJTJ/RS, 2023), Brazil has approximately 33,600 children and adolescents in institutional and/or family care situations. Of these, 3,600 are in Rio Grande do Sul, with 804 in Porto Alegre, of whom 180 are in the FPE, the location where this ethnography was conducted. This model presents similarities and differences in relation to international out-of-home care contexts, such as the foster care systems in countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. In these contexts, care practices have shifted from institutionalization to alternative family arrangements, prioritizing community and family coexistence (Höjer & Sjöblom, 2014; McTigue, 2021). However, research indicates that even in these models, children face restrictions regarding leisure, autonomy, and equitable access to cultural experiences (Punch, 2002; Gilligan, 2007), which reinforces the importance of understanding leisure practices in protective contexts. In Brazil, the analysis of leisure in this context proves relevant because it constitutes a fundamental right guaranteed to children and adolescents, as provided for in Articles 6 and 217 of the 1988 Federal Constitution. Leisure stands on the same level as the rights to education, health, food, work, housing, security, transportation, and social security (Brasil, 1988). Nevertheless, despite this constitutional equality, leisure has historically been treated in Brazil as a “social tool to be developed and handled for certain purposes” (Silveira et al., 2022, p. 1), undermining its material status as a right. Not infrequently, this right is negotiated to the detriment of others. Consequently, we sought to understand, from the empirical field, the connections, the associations established, and how actors connect and exercise agencies in the time-spaces of leisure in the Institutional Care Services of children and adolescents. Methodology This study was conducted using an ethnographic approach inspired by the anthropological studies of Strathern (2017) and articulated with Actor-Network Theory (ANT) by Latour (2012, 2006). The empirical field consisted of three residential care services (housing locations) operated by the Special Protection Foundation of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, a Brazilian public institution dedicated to providing institutional care for children and adolescents who have had their rights violated and whose family bonds have been weakened. These residential care services are located in the city of Porto Alegre, the state capital, which, during the research period, housed 33 children and adolescents. Institutional care in Brazil is a protective measure established by the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (Federal Law No. 8,069/1990), characterized not as a custodial regime but as a place of residence, with a provisional and exceptional nature, integrated into the community of the city. The field research was conducted over 13 months, between December 2022 and January 2024, through 42 ethnographic visits, resulting in 42 field diaries. Observations were carried out through immersion in the daily life of the residential care services, allowing the researcher to follow leisure practices in both formal and informal contexts, such as community parties, cultural events, external outings (to cinemas, parks, and soccer stadiums), as well as routine activities within the spaces of the residential care services themselves. The study adopts ANT as theory-method, understanding that leisure is not a set of isolated practices but effects of unstable networks of associations composed of humans and non-humans. Accordingly, the ethnography not only described behaviors but followed the agencements in operation among rules, objects, bodies, affects, institutional devices, and their daily routines. The ANT also required a redefinition of the researcher’s own position: more than an external observer, the researcher was affected by and co-produced within the network, engaging in alliances, tensions, and displacements (Latour, 2006). This stance required a continuous exercise of co-presence and openness to affects. Instead of assuming observational neutrality, the fieldwork involved displacements and destabilizations, features of an ethnography that, according to Strathern (2017), does not seek totalities but rather traces and connections. Leisure, as the object of analysis, was not previously isolated but followed in its controversies and bifurcations, as the networks were updated in the everyday interactions. Ethical Considerations This research was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles for research in the Human and Social Sciences, as established by Resolution No. 510/2016 and Resolution No. 580/2018 of the National Health Council of Brazil. The study was approved by a Research Ethics Committee, and all stages followed the criteria set forth in Article 3 of Resolution No. 510. The research also obtained formal authorization from the Special Protection Foundation of Rio Grande do Sul, the institution where the study was conducted, through a public administrative process. Results and Discussion Throughout this article, the results and discussions are organized into three analytical axes that, although distinct, intertwine in understanding leisure as a relational phenomenon within institutional care services. The first axis, “Leisure as Actor-Network,” presents an approach grounded in Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2012), which shifts the analysis of leisure from a substantial category or guaranteed right to understanding it as an effect of associations between humans and non-humans. In this movement, leisure is framed as contingent practices that emerge and dissolve according to the density and instability of the networks that sustain them. The second axis, “Leisure as a Fundamental Right: the Law as an Element of the Network,” challenges the idea that the legal norm alone guarantees access to leisure. Based on the ethnography analyzed, we demonstrate that the right to leisure is only realized when articulated with a potent network of agencements composed of actors, institutions, devices, objects, and affects capable of making the law act. The third axis, “Locked Leisure and the Lines of Flight,” discusses how institutional practices operate symbolic and material blockages that limit play, freedom, and autonomy of children. Even so, children create resistance, subvert norms, and build lines of flight, mobilizing other possibilities of existence within the network. Together, these three analyses not only highlight the complexity of leisure practices within institutional care services but also affirm the analytical potency of Actor-Network Theory to follow the bonds, tensions, and ways of life produced in this context. Leisure as Actor-Network Thinking about leisure from the perspective of ANT (Latour, 2012) requires distancing from substantialist categories and generalist notions that tend to define leisure as an autonomous and pre-established domain of social life. In ANT, phenomena do not preexist the relations that constitute them. Instead, they are contingent effects of heterogeneous networks composed of diverse elements in constant movement. Leisure, in this sense, is not a practice, a policy, or a right given in advance, but an association produced as links activate, extend, dissolve, or reestablish themselves in the daily flow of relations. When considering institutional care as the empirical field, we understand that leisure does not refer to an isolated object of intervention nor to bounded spaces of childhood expression. Rather, it consists of provisional networks composed of multiple elements that become actors at the moment the action is promulgated. These are toys, architectures, schedules, work shifts, rules, documents, resistances, institutional wear, affections, traces of past histories, and, above all, the bodies and desires of children and adolescents who, even under State guardianship, continuously negotiate their ways of being and acting in the world. Each of these elements and their articulations determine the possibility (or impossibility) of leisure’s existence. The ANT provides tools to understand that action is not an exclusive prerogative of human actors. A prohibited common space, a regulation defining “appropriate behaviors,” a toy at an event, a gate separating the yard from the street, all these elements act and produce effects in constituting leisure. The network is strained, stretched, or broken depending on how these components associate. Leisure, therefore, is not a final point or a state but a continuous process of composition; that is, it exists while its network is in operation (Fontes, 2024). In the practices observed in institutional care, leisure often arises as unstable emergencies. The absence of accessible toys, shortage of professionals, caregivers’ illness, and routines marked by limited time and resources all become elements within the network, often preventing leisure from materializing. However, when leisure does take place, it does not happen spontaneously; it is produced by an entanglement of relations operating like braided threads, where each component has agency and transformative power. This relational and dynamic character of leisure is evident in how it interacts with space and objects. A bicycle stored in a shed may represent prohibition (when locked) or freedom (when use is permitted). The same object participates in distinct networks, producing different effects according to the associations involved. Alternative spaces, even within traditional institutions, may generate unexpected opportunities for leisure and learning, challenging the normative logics of institutional control (Kraftl, 2013). Therefore, there is no fixed meaning or guaranteed function for the elements of the leisure network. They acquire meaning in the operations that update them. This logic allows us to advance a strategic understanding: leisure is not only what children and adolescents do, but what they manage to do with what is available, accessible, and mobilizable, and with the limits they must circumvent. For this reason, leisure networks, even within institutional care contexts with strict rules, do not disappear entirely. They continually reformulate, sometimes with fewer elements, other times in unstable configurations, but they continue to operate. Leisure is, therefore, a practice that, when performed, carries the potential to destabilize order, generate crises, create bonds, and affirm modes of existence that escape the logic of institutional control. Leisure practices in institutional care not only reflect how children and adolescents access spaces of enjoyment but also reveal the forces that compose and strain the networks of agencements surrounding that leisure. From the ANT perspective, every action is the product of an association; no actor acts alone (Latour, 2012). A rule, a body, an accessory, a room, a film, or a uniform becomes an operator of agency only when connected to other elements that make it function. This implies shifting the analysis from actors and their intentions to the networks that enable or restrict their actions. In leisure practices, these networks involve performances of gender that do not manifest solely through discourse but materialize in objects, norms, invitations, absences, and even silences. During one of the field observations at the residential care service (DC 35 – 12/09/2023), a boy asked if he could wear an earring. His question highlighted the way institutional rules operate on the bodies of children. The immediate response (that it would be necessary to consult the educators) was followed by a critical reply from the child himself: he acknowledged that there was a rule allowing the use of the accessory from twelve years of age, but he knew that a younger girl already wore one. The object “earring,” in this case, is not merely an ornament; it acts as a gender operator, a marker whose circulation between female and male bodies activates different effects. Other examples observed during the fieldwork reinforce how leisure practices, when crossed by institutional decisions, activate normative discourses about gender. The trip to the cinema to watch the movie The Little Mermaid was intended only for girls, while the boys were taken to see Mission: Impossible (DC 10 – 06/21/23; DC 15 – 07/19/23). The classification of the films as “princess” or “action” already presupposes a gender framing, reaffirmed by the separation of the groups. When a girl asks why they cannot watch the movie together at the cinema, as they do at the house (DC 15 – 07/19/23), she makes explicit a mismatch between the children’s everyday practice and the normativity imposed by the Institution. Similarly, another girl, forced to attend ballet classes while wanting to play soccer, an activity restricted to boys, shows how community projects and the referrals by the FPE reaffirm gender stereotypes and block experiences (DC 24 – 09/30/23). These examples demonstrate how leisure, when mediated by institutional rules, ceases to be an open network and becomes gendered spaces, marked by hegemonic ways of being a girl or a boy. Objects and rules gain strength only when entering a network of alliances and resistances (Latour, 2012). The institution, by associating certain bodies with certain types of leisure, such as shopping for girls and soccer for boys, acts as a purification machine (Latour, 1994), eliminating ambiguity and fixing identities. A visit to the Beira-Rio soccer stadium, on the occasion of a game whose entry was restricted to women and children (DC 42 – 01/27/24), reveals this controversy: although the official invitation mentioned this specific audience, FPE sent only boys accompanied by women. The girls, in turn, were taken to the shopping mall. The institution’s logic therefore operates with its own network of agencements, which does not necessarily coincide with that of the event’s rules or with the children’s desires. It is in the friction between these networks, the institutional regulations, those of the children and adolescents, the objects, and the practices, that leisure becomes a space of dispute. By wanting to play soccer, wear an earring, watch a movie, or attend the stadium, boys and girls perform resistance to the instituted associations and, at the same time, create new possible connections. Consequently, it is not only a matter of analyzing whether there is access to leisure, but of understanding how this access is agencied, by whom, and with which objects, rules, restrictions, and alliances. The network is a field of continuous negotiation (Latour, 2012), in which children and adolescents emerge as actors with agency, capable of reconfiguring, challenging, and reinventing the flows of what is understood as institutional leisure. Therefore, by adopting the ANT perspective, we reject the view of leisure as an article to be offered or a policy to be implemented and conceive it as a mode of collective agencements. This leads us to perceive that it is not guaranteed by the norm, institutional desire, or the goodwill of professionals. It is made and unmade in everyday practices, in associations woven each day. If we want to understand leisure in institutional care, we need to follow these networks in their materiality: in the bodies, objects, spaces, flows, and frictions that constitute them. It is in this intertwining that leisure reveals itself as one of the most subtle and powerful forms of life production within the institution. Because they are not merely distractions or rewards, but practices that affirm that, despite the siege of institutionalization, children and adolescents are capable of forging their own temporalities, creating possible worlds, and expanding, even if briefly, the boundaries of those instituted. Leisure as actor-network, therefore, is not a fixed territory but a field of forces in dispute, where one sometimes experiences what one can, sometimes what one wants, and sometimes what one invents with what one has. To deepen the understanding of leisure as an actor-network in the context of institutional care, we present Figure 1. This visualization seeks to reveal the multiple associations that constitute the network of agencements surrounding leisure practices in institutions. The connections are represented by dotted lines, indicating that the links between human and non-human actors are not fixed but unstable, in constant movement and transformation. We understand that each actor in the network possesses agency, that is, the capacity to affect and be affected, producing effects that, in turn, reconfigure the network itself. The density of this network depends on the quantity and strength of the associations: the more bifurcated and intense the links, the greater the possibilities that leisure practices materialize and are sustained in the daily lives of children and adolescents in situations of institutional care. This relational logic dispels any idea of a rigid hierarchy among elements (a rule, a space, a volunteer, a physical education professional, a toy, a child’s desire, or a judicial decision); all can, under certain conditions, operate as points of inflection. Even in contexts of control, there is always the possibility that some emergent agency will destabilize the network, opening space for leisure to be performed. The figure, therefore, does not close the map of relationships but invites engagement with them in their fluidity, bifurcations, and provisional compositions. Accordingly, from the perspective of Actor-Network Theory, leisure produces contingent effects from network associations that include regulations and objects as well as desires, resistances, and their practices. There is a play of forces that can both block and enable the existence of leisure: locked or accessible toys, gendered or subverted rules, administrative decisions, or child inventions. It is these dense and mobile networks that define what leisure can be, where, how, and for whom. Therefore, more than a policy to be implemented or a right to be merely proclaimed, leisure, when thought of as an actor-network, becomes a field of dispute, creation, and daily negotiation. This understanding will be further developed in the next section, in which we analyze how the law and legal devices connect (or disconnect) from these practices, and how they are (or are not) capable of producing effects on the modes of existence of leisure in institutions. Given this scenario, it becomes essential to challenge the existence of leisure as a fundamental right, as foreseen in the Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente and the Federal Constitution, and to reflect on the effects of its (non)guarantee in the daily lives of institutionalized children. Leisure as a fundamental right: the law as an element of the network Another element present in the leisure actor-network is the law. But when is the law effectively activated as part of the network? Unlike the traditional normative understanding that places it as a stable device guaranteeing rights, in ANT (Latour, 2012) the law is understood as an element that comes into action within the network, articulated with other actors, both human and nonhuman. One example occurred in one of the FPE facilities, where, due to the lack of physical education professionals, the technical team chose to leave the “leisure” field blank in the Individual Care Plan of the children and adolescents, a document provided for in the Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente and periodically required by the Juvenile Court ( Juizado da Infância e da Juventude - JIJ) and the Public Ministry ( Ministério Público - MP). This omission exposed the precariousness of the right to leisure in the care units. When this gap triggered the MP, the response came in the form of a notification threatening a fine for violation of a fundamental right. At that moment, the law updated itself as an actor, not by its mere textual existence, but by mobilizing a network of associations that made it act, triggered by actors involving the technical team, the document, the absence of professionals, the MP, and the Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente . When regularly filled, the “leisure” field in the Individual Care Plan did not destabilize the system. It was the visible emptiness, the absence, that put the law in motion. The mobilization of the law within the network allows us to reflect on leisure as a fundamental right. The 1988 Federal Constitution recognizes children and adolescents as subjects of rights. The Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente establishes that they must have absolute priority in the fulfillment of their rights. Among these, the right to leisure appears repeatedly, both in the Constitution and in the Estatuto itself. These rights are inalienable, imprescriptible, and cannot be renounced (Sarlet, 2015). Beyond the letter of the law, it is necessary to analyze how these rights gain or do not gain agency within institutions. The right to leisure is contained within the list of fundamental rights in Articles 6, 7, clause IV; 207, paragraph 3; and 227, caput of the 1988 Federal Constitution. Furthermore, it is defined in Articles 4, 16, 59, 71, 94, and 124 of the Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente . Fundamental rights aim to guarantee a dignified life, in which the principles of equality, liberty, and fraternity must be objectified and respected, without distinctions among human beings. It constitutes a fundamental guarantee because without these the person cannot survive or possess a dignified life. It is incumbent on all to recognize and consolidate these rights. Therefore, the right to leisure goes hand in hand with the right to health, education, food, and housing. According to Article 4 of the Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente : It is the duty of the family, the community, society in general, and the public authorities to ensure, with absolute priority, the fulfillment of the rights related to life, health, food, education, sport, leisure (emphasis added), professional training, culture, dignity, respect, liberty, and family and community coexistence. When analyzing the neoliberal logic and adult-centric, leisure ends up being a bargaining chip to reward or punish good or bad behavior (Mukherjee, 2024; Stigger & Thomassim, 2013). This is nothing more than operant conditioning, in which disciplinary power is established more by reflexes than by reflections, that is, the formation of an obedient subject, and there is also the force of a “training” of behavior through the appropriation of the culture of its practitioners and the imprisonment of the body. Although jurists consider the law sufficient for rights to be guaranteed, Latour warns of the difficulties in the agencements of the law: If we have so much difficulty focusing attention on the form of autonomy appropriate to the law, if it requires so much care to extend its fabric without tearing it, it is perhaps because of one last trait that cannot fail to affect the observer: its superficiality. If it sustains everything, if it allows connecting all people and all acts, if it authorizes, by a continuous path, connecting the Constitution to a minute case, it is also because it extracts only a tiny part of its essence in every situation. Its fabric resembles a perforated lace. This is what common sense retains of its movement, qualifying it as cold, formal, demanding, abstract, and empty. And yes, it must be empty! (...). The connection is tiny (...), the influence is minimal (Latour, 2019, p. 324-325, our translation). In the context of institutional care, Latour’s (2019) metaphor of the law as “perforated lace” helps to understand why the right to leisure, even when constitutionally enshrined, often does not materialize in practice. The law sustains a promise of connection between the Constitution and everyday life, in this case, between Art. 227 and the concrete play of children in residential care services; however, this connection is fragile, tenuous, and depends on many elements to remain active. The “leisure” field in the Individual Care Plan, for example, does not guarantee the enforcement of the right by itself: it only gains strength when articulated with other actors in the network, such as the professionals who fill it out (or not), FPE managers, the MP, working conditions, available toys, accessible spaces, and the children’s own desires. If any link in this chain breaks, the right becomes empty. Therefore, leisure as a fundamental right cannot be understood as guaranteed by its mere legal existence. Its agency is minimal unless supported by a network that activates it. Accordingly, approaching the right to leisure through the lens of ANT requires shifting the focus from normative guarantee to the ways in which this right is performed in everyday networks. The law is one element among many, fragile, sometimes silent, but capable of triggering effects when crossed by relationships. The challenge is not only to ensure that leisure is provided for in legislation but to understand how (Byrne, 2024), when, and why it gains agency in the lives of children and adolescents in institutional care. Throughout this ethnography, leisure can be identified as being activated by the Public Ministry in events such as the Adoption Race (DC 7 – 27/05/23) or the Giant Christmas (DC 34 – 04/12/23). In the case of the Adoption Race (DC 7 – 27/05/23), the juvenile prosecutor mandates FPE’s participation in the event, which is fully complied with and includes even infants. The participation of children and adolescents is not negotiable; it is compulsory. The juvenile prosecutor for Childhood and Youth justifies the Adoption Race by stating that: The idea is to bring to light the themes of adoption, affective sponsorship, family and institutional care, giving visibility to those in care (...). The project in question provides children and adolescents with the opportunity to meet their future families through sports, fulfilling one of its purposes, which is social inclusion (DC 7 – 27/05/23). The Public Ministry mobilizes social aspects to associate sports with the adoption agenda; however, the participating children and adolescents engage in this leisure activity with the purpose of freely enjoying themselves, without expectations of finding a family there; in other words, they modify the leisure practices and experience them in their own way. On this day, it is not only the race that takes place; there is a whole surrounding environment with inflatable toys, trampolines, music, and playfulness. The medal symbolizes, for those children and adolescents, the opportunity to have fun and the right to be there to play. The children and adolescents did not attach importance to the purpose of the race, that is, having the opportunity to have a family. They perform critical operations (Boltanski, 2016) and recognize that this is not the place to meet a family. One child said that: Here it is nice because we can play. There are many toys. We run as much as we want. The “uncles” (educators) do not keep yelling. At the little house, there is a lot of fighting. Here we are free. I liked the music. There are snacks, T-shirts, and medals. (...) I just do not want to stay chatting to see if I can get a family. I do not want to waste time. I want to play and grab tangerines (DC 07 – 27/05/23). The children and adolescents we observed at the Adoption Race established other associations, played, rolled on the ground, looked for gifts, ate, and ran. Leisure practices become increasingly sustained as a greater number of elements circulate within this space-time and become materialized in nonhumans, such as toys, medals, the feeling of freedom, food, music, and T-shirts. This relates to the fact that throughout the processes of appropriation, the more elements mobilized in this chain of associations, the more links are activated for children and adolescents to experience leisure practices, which often do not occur within the residential care services that constitute the FPE. Leisure practices are guaranteed to all, provided they are mandated by the Public Ministry; however, their agency is limited, as the network fails to sustain itself beyond the Prosecutor’s intervention. In other words, leisure is only strongly activated through isolated, timely actions. This allows reflection on the presence of elements capable of interfering with the constitution of social action, since leisure practices, when detached from the behaviors of children and adolescents, activate other elements in the network of associations, making leisure meaningful for the participants, even if it does not fulfill the social objective of promoting adoption. We consider that the forces of power may undermine the capacity of children and adolescents to fully experience their leisure, since by placing responsibility on leisure to make them visible for adoption purposes, each individual may feel compelled to make their life available to the public authorities. However, despite attempts by power to interfere and obscure individual experiences of leisure time-spaces, children and adolescents are able to critically engage with their leisure beyond the objectives of social control institutions. Similarly, we cite the Giant Christmas event (DC 34 – 12/04/23), also promoted by the Public Ministry in partnership with the Sport Club Internacional football club. We accompanied the 9 th edition of the event, which always takes place at the Beira-Rio Stadium, involving more than a thousand children and adolescents in institutional care, group homes, and foster families in Porto Alegre. The event is highly anticipated by the children. The Giant Christmas occurs on the stadium’s football pitch, with abundant food, several musical and cultural attractions, toys, games, face painting, football players, and the arrival of Santa Claus, who distributes toys to each child and adolescent. The children and adolescents enjoy themselves, making it a moment eagerly awaited by them. The Juvenile Prosecutor justifies the event to draw attention from authorities to the issue of institutional care and to highlight that there is only one registry office at the Juvenile Court and three judges to attend to all the demands of those children. At the studied event, to prevent children from missing due to health appointments or school activities, the Prosecutor sent a notice suspending health activities (except for urgent or emergency care), as well as school activities and any punitive impediment, to ensure participation by all children, revealing a collision of fundamental rights (leisure, health, education) and the need for careful consideration in the specific case. Even in large-scale events such as the Giant Christmas and the Adoption Race, the Public Ministry’s action, although powerful, remains dependent on the network that sustains it. In these two moments of the ethnography, we observed that “leisure won,” however, because an authority in the network (the Prosecutor) so determined, mobilizing transportation, personnel, and infrastructure. Consequently, we can ask, in what situation does leisure become a force for the FPE? When it provides institutional visibility, that is, when the power of the Public Ministry, which oversees the FPE, forces the institution to comply with a determination. Leisure occupies an important place for the Prosecutor and, when activated by this power, gains centrality. Children and adolescents participate, modify, create, enjoy, and have fun, engaging in leisure through their own associations. The agency of the law remains contingent, subject to the forces, interests, and flows that traverse this network. We understand that, from the perspective of ANT, the right to leisure does not operate as a static guarantor ensured by legislation, but as an element that only gains agency when activated by a dense and unstable network of associations. The law, on its own, is insufficient; its strength lies in its articulation with actors, documents, objects, practices, affects, and also with institutional figures such as the Public Prosecutor, whose timely action can trigger movements that mobilize entire structures. In the context of institutional care, leisure, even when recognized as a fundamental right, remains intermittent, frequently activated when there is public visibility or external provocation. By shifting the focus from the norm to practices, we highlight the gaps and tensions that permeate the realization of this right in everyday life. In the following section, we will deepen these dynamics by exploring the “locked leisure” situations, in which, despite legal recognition, access to play, entertainment, and freedom is systematically blocked, and where children, through lines of flight, construct other ways of existing within the network. Locked Leisure and Lines of Flight The ANT shows us that social phenomena are composed of networks of associations among multiple actors, both human and non-human, which connect to produce effects (Latour, 2012). This approach surpasses the traditional division between subject and object, proposing that people, things, norms, spaces, or devices all actively participate in action. The notion of monad, revisited by Latour from Tarde (2018), helps us to consider each actor, whether a child, a toy, a rule, or a space, as a relational entity that carries within it the possibility of multiple connections. Each monad does not exist in isolation but takes shape as it associates with others. Consequently, phenomena are understood as provisional effects of these network compositions. In the case of leisure, it involves tracking how these associations between children, objects, norms, and affects are organized, maintained, or dissolved throughout the daily institutional life. In everyday leisure practices, institutional rules affect the workers, who interpret and translate them into daily actions with the children and adolescents. In other words, a norm affects the adult in one way and, as it is performed by them, it is reformulated into actions, commands, or restrictions directed at the children so that they understand, in practice, what they can or cannot do, what is allowed or forbidden, and which behaviors are expected or punished. This is mediation with a strong disciplinary load, in which the rule is performed by the adult as “this or that must be done.” This process, however, reveals more than a simple normative mediation, as norms often materialize as instruments of behavioral control. The educators, shaped by previous models and by rigid institutional devices, end up enforcing these rules as a way to punish behaviors they classify as undesirable. It is in this context that the statement of an educator emerges: “At FEBEM, we locked them in, and the kid would not get out. That was how it worked at FEBEM, now here we have no way to do that” (DC 25 – 07/10/2023). This statement, combined with the ethnographic observations conducted, allows us to understand that if children and adolescents can no longer be literally locked, it is leisure that becomes locked, that is, blocked, restricted, or conditioned according to behaviors deemed appropriate by the institutional logic. This educator’s statement evokes the past of child and adolescent institutionalization institutions in Brazil. Therefore, we consider it relevant to note that the FPE is a public body at the state level, whose constitution is directly related to the extinction of the State Foundation for the Well-being of Minors ( Fundação Estadual para o Bem-Estar do Menor - FEBEM). The FEBEM was created in 1969 during the civil-military dictatorship, under the logic of the National Policy for the Well-being of Minors. It was a total institution, marked by confinement and the lack of differentiation between adolescents who committed offenses and children and adolescents in situations of social vulnerability. Therefore, it operated both as a repository of repression and as a mechanism of social control over vulnerable childhoods and adolescence. In Rio Grande do Sul, the FEBEM was only extinguished in 2002 as part of an institutional reorganization process following the enactment of the Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente in 1990. This reorganization resulted in the creation of both the FPE and the Foundation for Socio-Educational Services ( Fundação de Atendimento Socioeducativo - FASE) for adolescents in conflict with the law. Despite this, the past of the FEBEM is still invoked and continues to circulate within the institutional network of the FPE, shaping associations, practices, and ways of doing things, as shown by the reports of professionals who still use the term as a reference to justify present actions. It is in this context that ANT proposes that, to explain the actors’ actions, it is necessary to identify the connections that are established and their agencements (Latour, 2012). Therefore, ANT is a hybrid chain of associations among heterogeneous elements, and this chain needs to be described to understand the links being woven and the barriers that prevent associations from remaining established. As we have seen so far, these barriers include, for example, “undesirable” behaviors, gendering, institutional dissolution, and locks. What can make this chain expand are affective bonds, toys, and children’s strategies in the face of blockages. Therefore, these strategies can be understood as Lines of Flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 2021), in which possibilities lie in connections. They lie in the possibilities of building new associations in the empty spaces that remain and that are “locked” by the institution. Thinking about the association between lock and freedom, Art. 16, IV of the Statute of the Child and Adolescent defines the right to “play, practice sports, and have fun” as a right to freedom, among other aspects. We highlight, however, that spaces for free play in residential care services are rigidly blocked, making it difficult even to envision autonomous and everyday leisure. The conflicting environment, full of fights and shouting in the house, is mitigated when toys are available (Garibald et al., 2023). It is evident that there are disputes over the toys, but these are conflicts that the children and adolescents can manage without adult interference. When there is a lack of toys, the conflicts are of another kind, where adults have to intervene to resolve them, and the logic of punishment is activated. The toys are locked in an inaccessible room called the Recreation Room, whose key is with the care service’s management, and not even the educators have free access. Near the Recreation Room, there is a nursing room that stores medications. This one remained freely open. We observed that this room contained many medications and health equipment that were dangerous to be accessible to the children and adolescents; however, the locked room was the one containing toys. In one of the fields (DC 32 – 11/18/23), an educator reported that during the cleaning of the Recreation Room, located next to the Management Room, the children deliberately swapped the locks of the rooms, which were locked by the cleaning staff. The swap was only noticed when the workers wanted to access the room to work on their computers and could not. For hours, they tried to figure out how to open the management room until someone realized that the locks might have been switched. In other words, the children mobilized to demonstrate how bad it feels to be prevented from accessing a space intended for their leisure practices. The children took advantage of the same vector of blocking access; however, they reversed this vector against the adults. They were only able to change the direction of the vector because they are part of the network, so they have the agency to do so. The children's actions demonstrated a high level of sophistication. Besides leaving the adults locked out, the adults could not access their work materials. The effects of this act of resistance mobilized the structures to which the workers are subjected. Even though the children did not gain access to the toy room, they somehow blocked an entire power structure linked to the other side (adults) that affects them; that is, they traced a line of flight. At that moment, the imbalance that existed (adults accessing rooms and children and adolescents not accessing) was balanced, that is, put into symmetry. The adults did not have the same critical capacity to perceive the symmetry, verbalizing that the children had “misbehaved” and continued to lock the leisure space of the Recreation Room. Therefore, it is simpler to assume that children and adolescents are inferior than to acknowledge what was implicated in this action, which proposed a new direction for flows. The workers did not realize that by unlocking leisure practices, their work could become less burdensome. Locking away the toys blocks the very means through which reconnection and resignification can occur, not through fights, shouting, or conflict, but through play. The reevaluation of power relations in participatory methods emphasizes that power can be a productive force in the interactions between children and institutions (Gallagher, 2008). This perspective makes it possible to understand that children’s actions, such as the swapping of locks or the occupation of play spaces, not only resist institutional power but also reconfigure it, producing new agency possibilities within the network. There was a one-way flow in which workers had access to their room adjacent to the Recreation Room, while children and adolescents were denied access (reflecting a system in imbalance). When the locks were swapped, a crisis was triggered (destabilizing the system). However, once the key switch was discovered, the system reverted to its original state, an imbalance of access, stabilized once again according to institutional norms. In the daily life of Residential Care services, the toys were locked in the Recreation Room and were brought “into play” in the institution’s daily practices at predetermined moments, linked to pre-established behaviors. The same occurred with the space where the bicycles were locked. The key to the location hung on a necklace around the educator’s neck. What kind of doing-doing is embedded in wearing a key this way? Notice that it is not merely a person carrying a key; the gesture produces effects that suggest ownership, that only she can open the door, that is, that she holds the power. On power relations and the multiplicity of relations between humans and non-humans, Latour (2012, p. 123) states the following: When defining the quality control of ANT accounts, we must be extremely scrupulous and ascertain whether power and domination are indeed explained by the multiplicity of objects to which a central role is attributed and which are transported by empirically visible vehicles. It will not suffice for us to consider power and domination, in themselves, as a mysterious vault where that which moves the many participants of the action is enclosed. We observed how leisure practices in institutional care settings are shaped by agencements that produce blockages, restrictions, and disputes around play, access to objects and spaces, and the very exercise of freedom. The ANT made it possible to understand that the “locked leisure” does not refer only to physical locks, such as those that lock rooms and toys, but also names a broader institutional logic that regulates leisure as an instrument of control, reward, or punishment. Within this logic, leisure ceases to be a guaranteed right and becomes something conditioned upon behaviors previously deemed “appropriate.” The symbolic locks, therefore, lock time, the body, and the children’s possibilities for action. The institutional actions observed show that practices inherited from the FEBEM, such as disciplinary rigidity and the centralization of power, continue to operate within the FPE network, restricting access to leisure as a way of disciplining behavior. However, the children also activate strategies and lines of flight, reconfiguring flows and revealing invisible agencies. Conclusion This study showed that leisure, in the context of institutional care, cannot be understood as isolated practices, rights assured a priori, or fully guaranteed policies. By adopting ANT as an analytical lens, it was possible to follow leisure as the effects of heterogeneous networks composed of humans and non-humans, in motion. This approach made it possible to unravel established practices and identify the multiple agencements that sustain (or block) the leisure experienced by children and adolescents in care situations. Arriving at the notion of leisure as an actor-network involved engaging with different conceptions of leisure, breaking with closed and essentialist definitions. This theoretical shift made it possible to reassemble the elements that constitute leisure practices and observe how they are reconfigured based on the density of the connections that sustain them. At the FPE, these practices sometimes appeared powerful, sometimes fragile, depending on the alliances established. With each activation of a network, through toys, spaces, rules, affections, decisions, and resistances, leisure possibilities were triggered. The leisure that takes shape in the daily lives of the children and adolescents in this study, from playing in the yard to going to the cinema, from festivities to trips to the soccer stadium, from video games to outings to the square, is also a practice of radical insurgency. They not only produce ways of being in the world but also destabilize institutional logic, strain gendered norms, and call on the social to be rearranged based on the inventiveness of childhoods. Amid symbolic and material locks, these practices create cracks in what is established, opening gaps for other possible existences. The locks observed, whether locking toys, bicycles, or behaviors, reveal how much institutional control still organizes access to leisure. However, while they lock, the institutions are also challenged by lines of flight traced by the children themselves, who reframe objects, spaces, and relationships. The agency of children and adolescents becomes visible where least expected, that is, in the gesture of switching locks, in the silent refusal of the norm, in the reinvention of meaning in the face of the rule. Opening the locks of the black box of leisure without purifying them through closed concepts made it possible to undertake the exercise of reaggregating the multiple elements that constitute their practices, generating effects different from those obtained by viewing them solely through the lenses of established leisure studies theories. We conclude, therefore, that leisure in institutional care is not a neutral or harmonious territory. Leisure practices are fields of force and dispute that generate crises and instabilities. Recognizing leisure as an actor-network is to recognize the materiality of the bonds, absences, and resistances that make them possible. And, above all, it is to affirm that its potency lies less in its form than in its capacity to call the collective to create new networks of life, freedom, and imagination. Declarations All participants in the study "Unlocking Leisure: Ethnography in Institutional Care based on Actor-Network Theory," including institutional workers and children in residential care, participated voluntarily and provided informed consent. Legal guardians of the children, as well as institutional representatives, signed formal consent forms approving their participation. The study was reviewed and approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (approval number 5.863.284; CAAE 65822422.9.0000.5347), and all procedures complied with Brazilian ethical guidelines, including Resolutions CNS 466/2012 and 510/2016. In the case of children, assent was also obtained through age-appropriate materials and procedures, in accordance with national ethical regulations. References Blackshaw, T. (2017). Re-imagining leisure studies . New York: Routledge. Boltanski, L. (2016). Sociologia crítica ou sociologia da crítica . In F. Vandenberghe & J. Véran (Orgs.), Além do habitus: teoria social pós-bourdieusiana (pp. 129–154). 7Letras. Byrne, S. The Right to Leisure for Children with Disabilities: Towards Greater Awareness and Implementation . Int J Sociol Leis 7 , 369–390 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41978-024-00171-3 Brasil. (1988). Constituição da República Federativa do Brasil de 1988 . Brasília, DF: Senado Federal. Brasil. (1990/2023). Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente (Lei Federal n. 8069/1990, atualizado até a Lei nº 14.548/2023) . Porto Alegre: Assembleia Legislativa do RS. CIJTJ/RS. (2023). Coordenadoria da Infância e da Juventude do RS . https://www.tjrs.jus.br/novo/cij/dados-estatisticos/ Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2021). Mil platôs: Capitalismo e esquizofrenia (Vol. 1). Editora 34. Dumazedier, J. (2014). Lazer e cultura popular . São Paulo: Perspectiva. Elias, N., & Dunning, E. (1992). A busca da excitação . Lisboa: Difel. Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2010). Actor-Network Theory in Education . Routledge. Fontes, J. (2024). Desencadeando os lazeres: etnografia com crianças e adolescentes em acolhimento institucional [Dissertação de Mestrado, Anonymized University]. LUME Repositório Digital. http://hdl.handle.net/10183/280750 Gallagher, M. (2008). ‘Power is not an evil’: Rethinking power in participatory methods. Children’s Geographies, 6 (2), 137–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733280801963045 Garibaldi, V. M., Luiz, M. E. T., Franzoni, W. C. de C., Martins, S. E., Cunha, B. F. da, & Marinho, A. (2023). Play of children and adolescents in foster care institutions in a city in southern Brazil. Journal of Leisure Research , 55 (4), 488–505 https://doi.org/10.1080/00222216.2023.2239815 Gilligan, R. (2007). Adversity, resilience and young people: The protective value of positive school and spare time experiences. Children & Society, 14 (1), 37–47. https://doi.org/10.1002/chi.607 Höjer, I., & Sjöblom, Y. (2014). Voices of children in foster and residential care in Sweden: A study of young people’s perspectives. British Journal of Social Work, 44 (3), 568–585. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcs139 Kraftl, P. (2013). Geographies of Alternative Education: Diverse Learning Spaces for Children and Young People . Policy Press.. Latour, B. (2006). Como terminar uma tese de sociologia: pequeno diálogo entre um aluno e seu professor (um tanto socrático). Cadernos de Campo, 14/15 , 339–352. Latour, B. (2012). Reagregando o social: uma introdução à teoria do ator-rede. Salvador: EDUFBA. Latour, B. (2019). Jamais fomos modernos: ensaio de antropologia simétrica . São Paulo: Editora 34. Mukherjee, U. Beyond Work and Play: Decolonising Children’s Right to Leisure. Int J Sociol Leis 7 , 359–368 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41978-024-00159-z McTigue, M. (2021). Reimagining foster care: Young people’s perspectives on well-being. Child & Family Social Work, 26 (4), 636–645. https://doi.org/10.1111/cfs.12845 Punch, S. (2002). Youth transitions and interdependent adult–child relations in rural Bolivia. Journal of Rural Studies, 18 (2), 123–133. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0743-0167(01)00034-1 Rojek, C. (2010). The Labour of Leisure: The Culture of Free Time . London: Sage. Sayes, E. (2014). Actor-Network Theory and methodology: Just what does it mean to say that nonhumans have agency? Social Studies of Science, 44 (1), 134–149. Silveira, R., Pacheco, A. C., Caneva, C., & Myskiw, M. (2022). Women’s leading role in the political struggle for leisure: an ethnographic study in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Leisure Studies, 41 (1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2022.2070922 Stigger, M. P., & Thomassim, L. E. (2013). Entre o “serve” e o “significa”: uma análise sobre expectativas atribuídas ao esporte em projetos sociais. Licere, 16 (2), 1–33. Strathern, M. (2017). O efeito etnográfico e outros ensaios . São Paulo: Ubu Editora. Tarde, G. (2018). Monologia e sociologia: E outros ensaios . São Paulo: Editora. Veal, A. J. (2018). Leisure, Sport and Tourism: Politics, Policy and Planning (5th ed.). CABI. Additional Declarations No competing interests reported. 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Also discoverable on Platform About Our Team In Review Editorial Policies Advisory Board Help Center Resources Author Services Accessibility API Access RSS feed Manage Cookie Preferences © Research Square 2026 | ISSN 2693-5015 (online) Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information {"props":{"pageProps":{"initialData":{"identity":"rs-7285109","acceptedTermsAndConditions":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"archivedVersions":[],"articleType":"Research Article","associatedPublications":[],"authors":[{"id":496125700,"identity":"5ef5f3af-166d-4013-9833-e647bcedbd0f","order_by":0,"name":"Janaína Fontes","email":"data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAZAAAAAyAQMAAABI0h/eAAAABlBMVEX///8AAABVwtN+AAAACXBIWXMAAA7EAAAOxAGVKw4bAAAA90lEQVRIiWNgGAWjYBACxgYgUQFmMh+A8ODC+LScYWCQYGBgSyBOCxhAtPAYEKeFuf3swQ8HKu7U8fOf+Sbxc4eNHAP74aMbGHfcw+2wnrxkiQNnnklIzsjdJtl7Js2YgSct7QbjmWI8fskxkP7YdljC4AbvNgnetsOJDRI8ZjcY2xJwa+l/Y/zjIFCL/fkzzyT/EqVlRo6ZBEiLAUMOmzRxtsx4Y2Zx4MxhyRk30oytZdvSjNlAfkk8g1uLYX+O8Y0DFYf5+fsPP7z5ts1Gjp/98LEbH3fg0dKAYLNIgEg2EIFbAwODPBKb+QMehaNgFIyCUTCCAQBlfFodopExdwAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==","orcid":"","institution":"Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul","correspondingAuthor":true,"prefix":"","firstName":"Janaína","middleName":"","lastName":"Fontes","suffix":""},{"id":496125701,"identity":"66287938-6ee6-43dd-8195-91fdc013cc04","order_by":1,"name":"Clarissa Pinto Pizarro de Freitas","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Clarissa","middleName":"Pinto Pizarro","lastName":"de Freitas","suffix":""},{"id":496125702,"identity":"11882d35-1315-4916-b34f-65bc54038e64","order_by":2,"name":"Adriane Vieira","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Adriane","middleName":"","lastName":"Vieira","suffix":""},{"id":496125703,"identity":"4b85b736-af60-4fce-a480-41b9c9bbec35","order_by":3,"name":"Raquel Silveira","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Raquel","middleName":"","lastName":"Silveira","suffix":""}],"badges":[],"createdAt":"2025-08-03 19:08:09","currentVersionCode":1,"declarations":"","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-7285109/v1","doiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7285109/v1","draftVersion":[],"editorialEvents":[{"content":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s41978-026-00201-2","type":"published","date":"2026-02-18T15:58:48+00:00"}],"editorialNote":"","failedWorkflow":false,"files":[{"id":88516612,"identity":"83121e82-91d7-449f-80c3-c2083c464a05","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-08-07 08:58:56","extension":"png","order_by":1,"title":"Figure 1","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":44406,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eLeisure Actor-Network\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"1.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7285109/v1/d1ddf12b54caa0e2ead1dddf.png"},{"id":103252147,"identity":"d903453d-6fae-4404-aee8-227cdd7fc490","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2026-02-23 16:13:06","extension":"pdf","order_by":0,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"manuscript-pdf","size":489260,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"manuscript.pdf","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7285109/v1/4558fd17-a404-4f37-bc10-a1ec90cb91e4.pdf"}],"financialInterests":"No competing interests reported.","formattedTitle":"Unlocking Leisure: Ethnography in Institutional Care based on Actor-Network Theory","fulltext":[{"header":"Introduction","content":"\u003cp\u003eLeisure in institutional care situations is understood as the effect of multiple associations between humans and non-humans, including institutional rules, objects, spaces, and affects. It is neither fixed nor isolated, but rather a dynamic, performative, and situated practice that is continually updated through everyday interactions and negotiations. With theoretical support from Actor-Network Theory, leisure practices can be understood as emerging through the performance of networks, characterized as hybrid, unstable, and shaped by disputes, controversies, agencements, and critical operations (Fontes, 2024).\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStudies on leisure have relied on psychosocial, functionalist, or configurational perspectives. Approaches such as those of Dumazedier (2014), Elias and Dunning (1992), as well as contemporary critical sociological contributions such as Rojek (2010), tend to conceive of leisure as a sphere separate from obligation, a \u0026ldquo;free\u0026rdquo; time opposed to work, or as a reflection of the cultural and social transformations of modernity. Although these contributions have been central, their reliance on dualisms, such as subject/object, structure/action, macro/micro, limits their ability to capture the relational and material complexity of leisure practices in highly regulated contexts such as institutional care.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eActor-Network Theory (ANT), in this sense, represents a methodological and ontological shift. Instead of conceiving of leisure as a substantive domain or a stable analytical category, ANT allows it to be approached as a contingent effect of associations between humans and non-humans (Latour, 2012; Fenwick \u0026amp; Edwards, 2010; Sayes, 2014). This approach challenges the notion that human actors are the sole agents of action and highlights the agency distributed among objects, regulations, spaces, discourses, affects, and bodies.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy proposing the notion of \u0026ldquo;leisure as an actor-network,\u0026rdquo; this research contributes conceptually to the field by shifting the analytical focus from defining leisure to describing its agencements. This allows us to understand how seemingly simple practices, such as playing in the courtyard or choosing a movie, are effects of complex and unstable networks, and not merely expressions of individual preferences or products of structural conditions. In this context, we observe the need to renew leisure studies to incorporate approaches that address its materialities, spatialities, and everyday politics (Byrne, 2024; Blackshaw, 2017; Veal, 2018). Accordingly, ANT offers an innovative lens for apprehending leisure in its procedural and performative dimension, enabling observation of how it is made and unmade amid disputes, crises, alliances, resistances, and practices of invention. This is especially relevant in contexts where its existence is intermittent, as is the case in institutional care services.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBased on ANT, our interest in this investigation was to understand the leisure of children and adolescents in institutional care services. The aim was to observe the leisure practices of children and adolescents in institutional care services and to understand the associations surrounding this leisure. More specifically, we sought to describe how leisure is performed within the sphere of institutional care, the associations established around these practices, and to understand the agencies mobilized in the leisure of children and adolescents in Institutional Care situations. We therefore asked: What are the associations and controversies in leisure practices within the institutional care services of children and adolescents?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInstitutional care is a protective measure provided for in Article 101 of Brazilian Federal Law No. 8069 \u0026ndash; the Statute of the Child and Adolescent. In the State of Rio Grande do Sul (RS), it is implemented by the Special Protection Foundation of RS (\u003cem\u003eFunda\u0026ccedil;\u0026atilde;o de Prote\u0026ccedil;\u0026atilde;o Especial\u003c/em\u003e - FPE). The measure does not involve deprivation of liberty, as the children and adolescents, having had their rights violated, are placed by court order in residential care services for a provisional period of up to 18 months, separated from their families. According to information from the Childhood and Youth Coordination of RS (CIJTJ/RS, 2023), Brazil has approximately 33,600 children and adolescents in institutional and/or family care situations. Of these, 3,600 are in Rio Grande do Sul, with 804 in Porto Alegre, of whom 180 are in the FPE, the location where this ethnography was conducted.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis model presents similarities and differences in relation to international out-of-home care contexts, such as the foster care systems in countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. In these contexts, care practices have shifted from institutionalization to alternative family arrangements, prioritizing community and family coexistence (H\u0026ouml;jer \u0026amp; Sj\u0026ouml;blom, 2014; McTigue, 2021). However, research indicates that even in these models, children face restrictions regarding leisure, autonomy, and equitable access to cultural experiences (Punch, 2002; Gilligan, 2007), which reinforces the importance of understanding leisure practices in protective contexts.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn Brazil, the analysis of leisure in this context proves relevant because it constitutes a fundamental right guaranteed to children and adolescents, as provided for in Articles 6 and 217 of the 1988 Federal Constitution. Leisure stands on the same level as the rights to education, health, food, work, housing, security, transportation, and social security (Brasil, 1988). Nevertheless, despite this constitutional equality, leisure has historically been treated in Brazil as a \u0026ldquo;social tool to be developed and handled for certain purposes\u0026rdquo; (Silveira et al., 2022, p. 1), undermining its material status as a right. Not infrequently, this right is negotiated to the detriment of others. Consequently, we sought to understand, from the empirical field, the connections, the associations established, and how actors connect and exercise agencies in the time-spaces of leisure in the Institutional Care Services of children and adolescents.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Methodology","content":"\u003cp\u003eThis study was conducted using an ethnographic approach inspired by the anthropological studies of Strathern (2017) and articulated with Actor-Network Theory (ANT) by Latour (2012, 2006). The empirical field consisted of three residential care services (housing locations) operated by the Special Protection Foundation of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, a Brazilian public institution dedicated to providing institutional care for children and adolescents who have had their rights violated and whose family bonds have been weakened. These residential care services are located in the city of Porto Alegre, the state capital, which, during the research period, housed 33 children and adolescents. Institutional care in Brazil is a protective measure established by the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (Federal Law No. 8,069/1990), characterized not as a custodial regime but as a place of residence, with a provisional and exceptional nature, integrated into the community of the city.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe field research was conducted over 13 months, between December 2022 and January 2024, through 42 ethnographic visits, resulting in 42 field diaries. Observations were carried out through immersion in the daily life of the residential care services, allowing the researcher to follow leisure practices in both formal and informal contexts, such as community parties, cultural events, external outings (to cinemas, parks, and soccer stadiums), as well as routine activities within the spaces of the residential care services themselves.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe study adopts ANT as theory-method, understanding that leisure is not a set of isolated practices but effects of unstable networks of associations composed of humans and non-humans. Accordingly, the ethnography not only described behaviors but followed the agencements in operation among rules, objects, bodies, affects, institutional devices, and their daily routines. The ANT also required a redefinition of the researcher\u0026rsquo;s own position: more than an external observer, the researcher was affected by and co-produced within the network, engaging in alliances, tensions, and displacements (Latour, 2006). This stance required a continuous exercise of co-presence and openness to affects. Instead of assuming observational neutrality, the fieldwork involved displacements and destabilizations, features of an ethnography that, according to Strathern (2017), does not seek totalities but rather traces and connections. Leisure, as the object of analysis, was not previously isolated but followed in its controversies and bifurcations, as the networks were updated in the everyday interactions.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003eEthical Considerations\u0026nbsp;\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis research was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles for research in the Human and Social Sciences, as established by Resolution No. 510/2016 and Resolution No. 580/2018 of the National Health Council of Brazil. The study was approved by a Research Ethics Committee, and all stages followed the criteria set forth in Article 3 of Resolution No. 510. The research also obtained formal authorization from the Special Protection Foundation of Rio Grande do Sul, the institution where the study was conducted, through a public administrative process.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Results and Discussion","content":"\u003cp\u003eThroughout this article, the results and discussions are organized into three analytical axes that, although distinct, intertwine in understanding leisure as a relational phenomenon within institutional care services. The first axis, \u0026ldquo;Leisure as Actor-Network,\u0026rdquo; presents an approach grounded in Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2012), which shifts the analysis of leisure from a substantial category or guaranteed right to understanding it as an effect of associations between humans and non-humans. In this movement, leisure is framed as contingent practices that emerge and dissolve according to the density and instability of the networks that sustain them.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe second axis, \u0026ldquo;Leisure as a Fundamental Right: the Law as an Element of the Network,\u0026rdquo; challenges the idea that the legal norm alone guarantees access to leisure. Based on the ethnography analyzed, we demonstrate that the right to leisure is only realized when articulated with a potent network of agencements composed of actors, institutions, devices, objects, and affects capable of making the law act.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe third axis, \u0026ldquo;Locked Leisure and the Lines of Flight,\u0026rdquo; discusses how institutional practices operate symbolic and material blockages that limit play, freedom, and autonomy of children. Even so, children create resistance, subvert norms, and build lines of flight, mobilizing other possibilities of existence within the network. Together, these three analyses not only highlight the complexity of leisure practices within institutional care services but also affirm the analytical potency of Actor-Network Theory to follow the bonds, tensions, and ways of life produced in this context.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003eLeisure as Actor-Network\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThinking about leisure from the perspective of ANT (Latour, 2012) requires distancing from substantialist categories and generalist notions that tend to define leisure as an autonomous and pre-established domain of social life. In ANT, phenomena do not preexist the relations that constitute them. Instead, they are contingent effects of heterogeneous networks composed of diverse elements in constant movement. Leisure, in this sense, is not a practice, a policy, or a right given in advance, but an association produced as links activate, extend, dissolve, or reestablish themselves in the daily flow of relations.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen considering institutional care as the empirical field, we understand that leisure does not refer to an isolated object of intervention nor to bounded spaces of childhood expression. Rather, it consists of provisional networks composed of multiple elements that become actors at the moment the action is promulgated. These are toys, architectures, schedules, work shifts, rules, documents, resistances, institutional wear, affections, traces of past histories, and, above all, the bodies and desires of children and adolescents who, even under State guardianship, continuously negotiate their ways of being and acting in the world. Each of these elements and their articulations determine the possibility (or impossibility) of leisure\u0026rsquo;s existence.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe ANT provides tools to understand that action is not an exclusive prerogative of human actors. A prohibited common space, a regulation defining \u0026ldquo;appropriate behaviors,\u0026rdquo; a toy at an event, a gate separating the yard from the street, all these elements act and produce effects in constituting leisure. The network is strained, stretched, or broken depending on how these components associate. Leisure, therefore, is not a final point or a state but a continuous process of composition; that is, it exists while its network is in operation (Fontes, 2024).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the practices observed in institutional care, leisure often arises as unstable emergencies. The absence of accessible toys, shortage of professionals, caregivers\u0026rsquo; illness, and routines marked by limited time and resources all become elements within the network, often preventing leisure from materializing. However, when leisure does take place, it does not happen spontaneously; it is produced by an entanglement of relations operating like braided threads, where each component has agency and transformative power.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis relational and dynamic character of leisure is evident in how it interacts with space and objects. A bicycle stored in a shed may represent prohibition (when locked) or freedom (when use is permitted). The same object participates in distinct networks, producing different effects according to the associations involved. Alternative spaces, even within traditional institutions, may generate unexpected opportunities for leisure and learning, challenging the normative logics of institutional control (Kraftl, 2013). Therefore, there is no fixed meaning or guaranteed function for the elements of the leisure network. They acquire meaning in the operations that update them. This logic allows us to advance a strategic understanding: leisure is not only what children and adolescents do, but what they manage to do with what is available, accessible, and mobilizable, and with the limits they must circumvent. For this reason, leisure networks, even within institutional care contexts with strict rules, do not disappear entirely. They continually reformulate, sometimes with fewer elements, other times in unstable configurations, but they continue to operate. Leisure is, therefore, a practice that, when performed, carries the potential to destabilize order, generate crises, create bonds, and affirm modes of existence that escape the logic of institutional control.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLeisure practices in institutional care not only reflect how children and adolescents access spaces of enjoyment but also reveal the forces that compose and strain the networks of agencements surrounding that leisure. From the ANT perspective, every action is the product of an association; no actor acts alone (Latour, 2012). A rule, a body, an accessory, a room, a film, or a uniform becomes an operator of agency only when connected to other elements that make it function. This implies shifting the analysis from actors and their intentions to the networks that enable or restrict their actions. In leisure practices, these networks involve performances of gender that do not manifest solely through discourse but materialize in objects, norms, invitations, absences, and even silences.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDuring one of the field observations at the residential care service (DC 35 \u0026ndash; 12/09/2023), a boy asked if he could wear an earring. His question highlighted the way institutional rules operate on the bodies of children. The immediate response (that it would be necessary to consult the educators) was followed by a critical reply from the child himself: he acknowledged that there was a rule allowing the use of the accessory from twelve years of age, but he knew that a younger girl already wore one. The object \u0026ldquo;earring,\u0026rdquo; in this case, is not merely an ornament; it acts as a gender operator, a marker whose circulation between female and male bodies activates different effects.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOther examples observed during the fieldwork reinforce how leisure practices, when crossed by institutional decisions, activate normative discourses about gender. The trip to the cinema to watch the movie The Little Mermaid was intended only for girls, while the boys were taken to see Mission: Impossible (DC 10 \u0026ndash; 06/21/23; DC 15 \u0026ndash; 07/19/23). The classification of the films as \u0026ldquo;princess\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;action\u0026rdquo; already presupposes a gender framing, reaffirmed by the separation of the groups. When a girl asks why they cannot watch the movie together at the cinema, as they do at the house (DC 15 \u0026ndash; 07/19/23), she makes explicit a mismatch between the children\u0026rsquo;s everyday practice and the normativity imposed by the Institution. Similarly, another girl, forced to attend ballet classes while wanting to play soccer, an activity restricted to boys, shows how community projects and the referrals by the FPE reaffirm gender stereotypes and block experiences (DC 24 \u0026ndash; 09/30/23).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese examples demonstrate how leisure, when mediated by institutional rules, ceases to be an open network and becomes gendered spaces, marked by hegemonic ways of being a girl or a boy. Objects and rules gain strength only when entering a network of alliances and resistances (Latour, 2012). The institution, by associating certain bodies with certain types of leisure, such as shopping for girls and soccer for boys, acts as a purification machine (Latour, 1994), eliminating ambiguity and fixing identities. A visit to the Beira-Rio soccer stadium, on the occasion of a game whose entry was restricted to women and children (DC 42 \u0026ndash; 01/27/24), reveals this controversy: although the official invitation mentioned this specific audience, FPE sent only boys accompanied by women. The girls, in turn, were taken to the shopping mall. The institution\u0026rsquo;s logic therefore operates with its own network of agencements, which does not necessarily coincide with that of the event\u0026rsquo;s rules or with the children\u0026rsquo;s desires.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is in the friction between these networks, the institutional regulations, those of the children and adolescents, the objects, and the practices, that leisure becomes a space of dispute. By wanting to play soccer, wear an earring, watch a movie, or attend the stadium, boys and girls perform resistance to the instituted associations and, at the same time, create new possible connections. Consequently, it is not only a matter of analyzing whether there is access to leisure, but of understanding how this access is agencied, by whom, and with which objects, rules, restrictions, and alliances. The network is a field of continuous negotiation (Latour, 2012), in which children and adolescents emerge as actors with agency, capable of reconfiguring, challenging, and reinventing the flows of what is understood as institutional leisure.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTherefore, by adopting the ANT perspective, we reject the view of leisure as an article to be offered or a policy to be implemented and conceive it as a mode of collective agencements. This leads us to perceive that it is not guaranteed by the norm, institutional desire, or the goodwill of professionals. It is made and unmade in everyday practices, in associations woven each day. If we want to understand leisure in institutional care, we need to follow these networks in their materiality: in the bodies, objects, spaces, flows, and frictions that constitute them.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is in this intertwining that leisure reveals itself as one of the most subtle and powerful forms of life production within the institution. Because they are not merely distractions or rewards, but practices that affirm that, despite the siege of institutionalization, children and adolescents are capable of forging their own temporalities, creating possible worlds, and expanding, even if briefly, the boundaries of those instituted. Leisure as actor-network, therefore, is not a fixed territory but a field of forces in dispute, where one sometimes experiences what one can, sometimes what one wants, and sometimes what one invents with what one has.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo deepen the understanding of leisure as an actor-network in the context of institutional care, we present Figure 1. This visualization seeks to reveal the multiple associations that constitute the network of agencements surrounding leisure practices in institutions. The connections are represented by dotted lines, indicating that the links between human and non-human actors are not fixed but unstable, in constant movement and transformation. We understand that each actor in the network possesses agency, that is, the capacity to affect and be affected, producing effects that, in turn, reconfigure the network itself.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe density of this network depends on the quantity and strength of the associations: the more bifurcated and intense the links, the greater the possibilities that leisure practices materialize and are sustained in the daily lives of children and adolescents in situations of institutional care. This relational logic dispels any idea of a rigid hierarchy among elements (a rule, a space, a volunteer, a physical education professional, a toy, a child\u0026rsquo;s desire, or a judicial decision); all can, under certain conditions, operate as points of inflection. Even in contexts of control, there is always the possibility that some emergent agency will destabilize the network, opening space for leisure to be performed. The figure, therefore, does not close the map of relationships but invites engagement with them in their fluidity, bifurcations, and provisional compositions.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAccordingly, from the perspective of Actor-Network Theory, leisure produces contingent effects from network associations that include regulations and objects as well as desires, resistances, and their practices. There is a play of forces that can both block and enable the existence of leisure: locked or accessible toys, gendered or subverted rules, administrative decisions, or child inventions. It is these dense and mobile networks that define what leisure can be, where, how, and for whom. Therefore, more than a policy to be implemented or a right to be merely proclaimed, leisure, when thought of as an actor-network, becomes a field of dispute, creation, and daily negotiation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis understanding will be further developed in the next section, in which we analyze how the law and legal devices connect (or disconnect) from these practices, and how they are (or are not) capable of producing effects on the modes of existence of leisure in institutions. Given this scenario, it becomes essential to challenge the existence of leisure as a fundamental right, as foreseen in the \u003cem\u003eEstatuto da Crian\u0026ccedil;a e do Adolescente\u003c/em\u003e and the Federal Constitution, and to reflect on the effects of its (non)guarantee in the daily lives of institutionalized children.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003eLeisure as a fundamental right: the law as an element of the network\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnother element present in the leisure actor-network is the law. But when is the law effectively activated as part of the network? Unlike the traditional normative understanding that places it as a stable device guaranteeing rights, in ANT (Latour, 2012) the law is understood as an element that comes into action within the network, articulated with other actors, both human and nonhuman. One example occurred in one of the FPE facilities, where, due to the lack of physical education professionals, the technical team chose to leave the \u0026ldquo;leisure\u0026rdquo; field blank in the Individual Care Plan of the children and adolescents, a document provided for in the \u003cem\u003eEstatuto da Crian\u0026ccedil;a e do Adolescente\u003c/em\u003e and periodically required by the Juvenile Court (\u003cem\u003eJuizado da Inf\u0026acirc;ncia e da Juventude\u003c/em\u003e - JIJ) and the Public Ministry (\u003cem\u003eMinist\u0026eacute;rio P\u0026uacute;blico\u003c/em\u003e - MP). This omission exposed the precariousness of the right to leisure in the care units. When this gap triggered the MP, the response came in the form of a notification threatening a fine for violation of a fundamental right. At that moment, the law updated itself as an actor, not by its mere textual existence, but by mobilizing a network of associations that made it act, triggered by actors involving the technical team, the document, the absence of professionals, the MP, and the \u003cem\u003eEstatuto da Crian\u0026ccedil;a e do Adolescente\u003c/em\u003e. When regularly filled, the \u0026ldquo;leisure\u0026rdquo; field in the Individual Care Plan did not destabilize the system. It was the visible emptiness, the absence, that put the law in motion.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe mobilization of the law within the network allows us to reflect on leisure as a fundamental right. The 1988 Federal Constitution recognizes children and adolescents as subjects of rights. The \u003cem\u003eEstatuto da Crian\u0026ccedil;a e do Adolescente\u003c/em\u003e establishes that they must have absolute priority in the fulfillment of their rights. Among these, the right to leisure appears repeatedly, both in the Constitution and in the \u003cem\u003eEstatuto\u003c/em\u003e itself. These rights are inalienable, imprescriptible, and cannot be renounced (Sarlet, 2015). Beyond the letter of the law, it is necessary to analyze how these rights gain or do not gain agency within institutions.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe right to leisure is contained within the list of fundamental rights in Articles 6, 7, clause IV; 207, paragraph 3; and 227, caput of the 1988 Federal Constitution. Furthermore, it is defined in Articles 4, 16, 59, 71, 94, and 124 of the \u003cem\u003eEstatuto da Crian\u0026ccedil;a e do Adolescente\u003c/em\u003e. Fundamental rights aim to guarantee a dignified life, in which the principles of equality, liberty, and fraternity must be objectified and respected, without distinctions among human beings. It constitutes a fundamental guarantee because without these the person cannot survive or possess a dignified life. It is incumbent on all to recognize and consolidate these rights. Therefore, the right to leisure goes hand in hand with the right to health, education, food, and housing. According to Article 4 of the \u003cem\u003eEstatuto da Crian\u0026ccedil;a e do Adolescente\u003c/em\u003e:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is the duty of the family, the community, society in general, and the public authorities to ensure, with absolute priority, the fulfillment of the rights related to life, health, food, education, sport, \u003cstrong\u003eleisure\u003c/strong\u003e (emphasis added), professional training, culture, dignity, respect, liberty, and family and community coexistence.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen analyzing the neoliberal logic and adult-centric, leisure ends up being a bargaining chip to reward or punish good or bad behavior (Mukherjee, 2024; Stigger \u0026amp; Thomassim, 2013). This is nothing more than operant conditioning, in which disciplinary power is established more by reflexes than by reflections, that is, the formation of an obedient subject, and there is also the force of a \u0026ldquo;training\u0026rdquo; of behavior through the appropriation of the culture of its practitioners and the imprisonment of the body.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlthough jurists consider the law sufficient for rights to be guaranteed, Latour warns of the difficulties in the agencements of the law:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf we have so much difficulty focusing attention on the form of autonomy appropriate to the law, if it requires so much care to extend its fabric without tearing it, it is perhaps because of one last trait that cannot fail to affect the observer: its superficiality. If it sustains everything, if it allows connecting all people and all acts, if it authorizes, by a continuous path, connecting the Constitution to a minute case, it is also because it extracts only a tiny part of its essence in every situation. Its fabric resembles a perforated lace. This is what common sense retains of its movement, qualifying it as cold, formal, demanding, abstract, and empty. And yes, it must be empty! (...). The connection is tiny (...), the influence is minimal (Latour, 2019, p. 324-325, our translation).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the context of institutional care, Latour\u0026rsquo;s (2019) metaphor of the law as \u0026ldquo;perforated lace\u0026rdquo; helps to understand why the right to leisure, even when constitutionally enshrined, often does not materialize in practice. The law sustains a promise of connection between the Constitution and everyday life, in this case, between Art. 227 and the concrete play of children in residential care services; however, this connection is fragile, tenuous, and depends on many elements to remain active. The \u0026ldquo;leisure\u0026rdquo; field in the Individual Care Plan, for example, does not guarantee the enforcement of the right by itself: it only gains strength when articulated with other actors in the network, such as the professionals who fill it out (or not), FPE managers, the MP, working conditions, available toys, accessible spaces, and the children\u0026rsquo;s own desires. If any link in this chain breaks, the right becomes empty. Therefore, leisure as a fundamental right cannot be understood as guaranteed by its mere legal existence. Its agency is minimal unless supported by a network that activates it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAccordingly, approaching the right to leisure through the lens of ANT requires shifting the focus from normative guarantee to the ways in which this right is performed in everyday networks. The law is one element among many, fragile, sometimes silent, but capable of triggering effects when crossed by relationships. The challenge is not only to ensure that leisure is provided for in legislation but to understand how (Byrne, 2024), when, and why it gains agency in the lives of children and adolescents in institutional care.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThroughout this ethnography, leisure can be identified as being activated by the Public Ministry in events such as the Adoption Race (DC 7 \u0026ndash; 27/05/23) or the Giant Christmas (DC 34 \u0026ndash; 04/12/23). In the case of the Adoption Race (DC 7 \u0026ndash; 27/05/23), the juvenile prosecutor mandates FPE\u0026rsquo;s participation in the event, which is fully complied with and includes even infants. The participation of children and adolescents is not negotiable; it is compulsory. The juvenile prosecutor for Childhood and Youth justifies the Adoption Race by stating that:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe idea is to bring to light the themes of adoption, affective sponsorship, family and institutional care, giving visibility to those in care (...). The project in question provides children and adolescents with the opportunity to meet their future families through sports, fulfilling one of its purposes, which is social inclusion (DC 7 \u0026ndash; 27/05/23).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Public Ministry mobilizes social aspects to associate sports with the adoption agenda; however, the participating children and adolescents engage in this leisure activity with the purpose of freely enjoying themselves, without expectations of finding a family there; in other words, they modify the leisure practices and experience them in their own way. On this day, it is not only the race that takes place; there is a whole surrounding environment with inflatable toys, trampolines, music, and playfulness. The medal symbolizes, for those children and adolescents, the opportunity to have fun and the right to be there to play. The children and adolescents did not attach importance to the purpose of the race, that is, having the opportunity to have a family. They perform critical operations (Boltanski, 2016) and recognize that this is not the place to meet a family. One child said that:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere it is nice because we can play. There are many toys. We run as much as we want. The \u0026ldquo;uncles\u0026rdquo; (educators) do not keep yelling. At the little house, there is a lot of fighting. Here we are free. I liked the music. There are snacks, T-shirts, and medals. (...) I just do not want to stay chatting to see if I can get a family. I do not want to waste time. I want to play and grab tangerines (DC 07 \u0026ndash; 27/05/23).\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe children and adolescents we observed at the Adoption Race established other associations, played, rolled on the ground, looked for gifts, ate, and ran. Leisure practices become increasingly sustained as a greater number of elements circulate within this space-time and become materialized in nonhumans, such as toys, medals, the feeling of freedom, food, music, and T-shirts. This relates to the fact that throughout the processes of appropriation, the more elements mobilized in this chain of associations, the more links are activated for children and adolescents to experience leisure practices, which often do not occur within the residential care services that constitute the FPE.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLeisure practices are guaranteed to all, provided they are mandated by the Public Ministry; however, their agency is limited, as the network fails to sustain itself beyond the Prosecutor\u0026rsquo;s intervention. In other words, leisure is only strongly activated through isolated, timely actions. This allows reflection on the presence of elements capable of interfering with the constitution of social action, since leisure practices, when detached from the behaviors of children and adolescents, activate other elements in the network of associations, making leisure meaningful for the participants, even if it does not fulfill the social objective of promoting adoption.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe consider that the forces of power may undermine the capacity of children and adolescents to fully experience their leisure, since by placing responsibility on leisure to make them visible for adoption purposes, each individual may feel compelled to make their life available to the public authorities. However, despite attempts by power to interfere and obscure individual experiences of leisure time-spaces, children and adolescents are able to critically engage with their leisure beyond the objectives of social control institutions.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSimilarly, we cite the \u003cem\u003eGiant Christmas\u0026nbsp;\u003c/em\u003eevent (DC 34 \u0026ndash; 12/04/23), also promoted by the Public Ministry in partnership with the Sport Club Internacional football club. We accompanied the 9\u003csup\u003eth\u003c/sup\u003e edition of the event, which always takes place at the Beira-Rio Stadium, involving more than a thousand children and adolescents in institutional care, group homes, and foster families in Porto Alegre.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe event is highly anticipated by the children. The Giant Christmas occurs on the stadium\u0026rsquo;s football pitch, with abundant food, several musical and cultural attractions, toys, games, face painting, football players, and the arrival of Santa Claus, who distributes toys to each child and adolescent. The children and adolescents enjoy themselves, making it a moment eagerly awaited by them.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Juvenile Prosecutor justifies the event to draw attention from authorities to the issue of institutional care and to highlight that there is only one registry office at the Juvenile Court and three judges to attend to all the demands of those children. At the studied event, to prevent children from missing due to health appointments or school activities, the Prosecutor sent a notice suspending health activities (except for urgent or emergency care), as well as school activities and any punitive impediment, to ensure participation by all children, revealing a collision of fundamental rights (leisure, health, education) and the need for careful consideration in the specific case.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEven in large-scale events such as the Giant Christmas and the Adoption Race, the Public Ministry\u0026rsquo;s action, although powerful, remains dependent on the network that sustains it. In these two moments of the ethnography, we observed that \u0026ldquo;leisure won,\u0026rdquo; however, because an authority in the network (the Prosecutor) so determined, mobilizing transportation, personnel, and infrastructure. Consequently, we can ask, in what situation does leisure become a force for the FPE? When it provides institutional visibility, that is, when the power of the Public Ministry, which oversees the FPE, forces the institution to comply with a determination. Leisure occupies an important place for the Prosecutor and, when activated by this power, gains centrality. Children and adolescents participate, modify, create, enjoy, and have fun, engaging in leisure through their own associations. The agency of the law remains contingent, subject to the forces, interests, and flows that traverse this network.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe understand that, from the perspective of ANT, the right to leisure does not operate as a static guarantor ensured by legislation, but as an element that only gains agency when activated by a dense and unstable network of associations. The law, on its own, is insufficient; its strength lies in its articulation with actors, documents, objects, practices, affects, and also with institutional figures such as the Public Prosecutor, whose timely action can trigger movements that mobilize entire structures. In the context of institutional care, leisure, even when recognized as a fundamental right, remains intermittent, frequently activated when there is public visibility or external provocation. By shifting the focus from the norm to practices, we highlight the gaps and tensions that permeate the realization of this right in everyday life. In the following section, we will deepen these dynamics by exploring the \u0026ldquo;locked leisure\u0026rdquo; situations, in which, despite legal recognition, access to play, entertainment, and freedom is systematically blocked, and where children, through lines of flight, construct other ways of existing within the network.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003eLocked Leisure and Lines of Flight\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe ANT shows us that social phenomena are composed of networks of associations among multiple actors, both human and non-human, which connect to produce effects (Latour, 2012). This approach surpasses the traditional division between subject and object, proposing that people, things, norms, spaces, or devices all actively participate in action. The notion of monad, revisited by Latour from Tarde (2018), helps us to consider each actor, whether a child, a toy, a rule, or a space, as a relational entity that carries within it the possibility of multiple connections. Each monad does not exist in isolation but takes shape as it associates with others. Consequently, phenomena are understood as provisional effects of these network compositions.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the case of leisure, it involves tracking how these associations between children, objects, norms, and affects are organized, maintained, or dissolved throughout the daily institutional life. In everyday leisure practices, institutional rules affect the workers, who interpret and translate them into daily actions with the children and adolescents. In other words, a norm affects the adult in one way and, as it is performed by them, it is reformulated into actions, commands, or restrictions directed at the children so that they understand, in practice, what they can or cannot do, what is allowed or forbidden, and which behaviors are expected or punished. This is mediation with a strong disciplinary load, in which the rule is performed by the adult as \u0026ldquo;this or that must be done.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis process, however, reveals more than a simple normative mediation, as norms often materialize as instruments of behavioral control. The educators, shaped by previous models and by rigid institutional devices, end up enforcing these rules as a way to punish behaviors they classify as undesirable. It is in this context that the statement of an educator emerges: \u0026ldquo;At FEBEM, we locked them in, and the kid would not get out. That was how it worked at FEBEM, now here we have no way to do that\u0026rdquo; (DC 25 \u0026ndash; 07/10/2023). This statement, combined with the ethnographic observations conducted, allows us to understand that if children and adolescents can no longer be literally locked, it is leisure that becomes locked, that is, blocked, restricted, or conditioned according to behaviors deemed appropriate by the institutional logic.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis educator\u0026rsquo;s statement evokes the past of child and adolescent institutionalization institutions in Brazil. Therefore, we consider it relevant to note that the FPE is a public body at the state level, whose constitution is directly related to the extinction of the State Foundation for the Well-being of Minors (\u003cem\u003eFunda\u0026ccedil;\u0026atilde;o Estadual para o Bem-Estar do Menor\u003c/em\u003e - FEBEM). The FEBEM was created in 1969 during the civil-military dictatorship, under the logic of the National Policy for the Well-being of Minors. It was a total institution, marked by confinement and the lack of differentiation between adolescents who committed offenses and children and adolescents in situations of social vulnerability. Therefore, it operated both as a repository of repression and as a mechanism of social control over vulnerable childhoods and adolescence. In Rio Grande do Sul, the FEBEM was only extinguished in 2002 as part of an institutional reorganization process following the enactment of the \u003cem\u003eEstatuto da Crian\u0026ccedil;a e do Adolescente\u003c/em\u003e in 1990. This reorganization resulted in the creation of both the FPE and the Foundation for Socio-Educational Services (\u003cem\u003eFunda\u0026ccedil;\u0026atilde;o de Atendimento Socioeducativo\u003c/em\u003e - FASE) for adolescents in conflict with the law. Despite this, the past of the FEBEM is still invoked and continues to circulate within the institutional network of the FPE, shaping associations, practices, and ways of doing things, as shown by the reports of professionals who still use the term as a reference to justify present actions.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is in this context that ANT proposes that, to explain the actors\u0026rsquo; actions, it is necessary to identify the connections that are established and their agencements (Latour, 2012). Therefore, ANT is a hybrid chain of associations among heterogeneous elements, and this chain needs to be described to understand the links being woven and the barriers that prevent associations from remaining established. As we have seen so far, these barriers include, for example, \u0026ldquo;undesirable\u0026rdquo; behaviors, gendering, institutional dissolution, and locks. What can make this chain expand are affective bonds, toys, and children\u0026rsquo;s strategies in the face of blockages. Therefore, these strategies can be understood as Lines of Flight (Deleuze \u0026amp; Guattari, 2021), in which possibilities lie in connections. They lie in the possibilities of building new associations in the empty spaces that remain and that are \u0026ldquo;locked\u0026rdquo; by the institution. Thinking about the association between lock and freedom, Art. 16, IV of the Statute of the Child and Adolescent defines the right to \u0026ldquo;play, practice sports, and have fun\u0026rdquo; as a right to freedom, among other aspects. \u0026nbsp;We highlight, however, that spaces for free play in residential care services are rigidly blocked, making it difficult even to envision autonomous and everyday leisure. The conflicting environment, full of fights and shouting in the house, is mitigated when toys are available (Garibald et al., 2023). It is evident that there are disputes over the toys, but these are conflicts that the children and adolescents can manage without adult interference. When there is a lack of toys, the conflicts are of another kind, where adults have to intervene to resolve them, and the logic of punishment is activated.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe toys are locked in an inaccessible room called the Recreation Room, whose key is with the care service\u0026rsquo;s management, and not even the educators have free access. Near the Recreation Room, there is a nursing room that stores medications. This one remained freely open. We observed that this room contained many medications and health equipment that were dangerous to be accessible to the children and adolescents; however, the locked room was the one containing toys.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn one of the fields (DC 32 \u0026ndash; 11/18/23), an educator reported that during the cleaning of the Recreation Room, located next to the Management Room, the children deliberately swapped the locks of the rooms, which were locked by the cleaning staff. The swap was only noticed when the workers wanted to access the room to work on their computers and could not. For hours, they tried to figure out how to open the management room until someone realized that the locks might have been switched. In other words, the children mobilized to demonstrate how bad it feels to be prevented from accessing a space intended for their leisure practices. The children took advantage of the same vector of blocking access; however, they reversed this vector against the adults. They were only able to change the direction of the vector because they are part of the network, so they have the agency to do so. The children\u0026apos;s actions demonstrated a high level of sophistication. Besides leaving the adults locked out, the adults could not access their work materials. The effects of this act of resistance mobilized the structures to which the workers are subjected.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEven though the children did not gain access to the toy room, they somehow blocked an entire power structure linked to the other side (adults) that affects them; that is, they traced a line of flight. At that moment, the imbalance that existed (adults accessing rooms and children and adolescents not accessing) was balanced, that is, put into symmetry. The adults did not have the same critical capacity to perceive the symmetry, verbalizing that the children had \u0026ldquo;misbehaved\u0026rdquo; and continued to lock the leisure space of the Recreation Room. Therefore, it is simpler to assume that children and adolescents are inferior than to acknowledge what was implicated in this action, which proposed a new direction for flows. The workers did not realize that by unlocking leisure practices, their work could become less burdensome. Locking away the toys blocks the very means through which reconnection and resignification can occur, not through fights, shouting, or conflict, but through play. The reevaluation of power relations in participatory methods emphasizes that power can be a productive force in the interactions between children and institutions (Gallagher, 2008). This perspective makes it possible to understand that children\u0026rsquo;s actions, such as the swapping of locks or the occupation of play spaces, not only resist institutional power but also reconfigure it, producing new agency possibilities within the network.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere was a one-way flow in which workers had access to their room adjacent to the Recreation Room, while children and adolescents were denied access (reflecting a system in imbalance). When the locks were swapped, a crisis was triggered (destabilizing the system). However, once the key switch was discovered, the system reverted to its original state, an imbalance of access, stabilized once again according to institutional norms.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the daily life of Residential Care services, the toys were locked in the Recreation Room and were brought \u0026ldquo;into play\u0026rdquo; in the institution\u0026rsquo;s daily practices at predetermined moments, linked to pre-established behaviors. The same occurred with the space where the bicycles were locked. The key to the location hung on a necklace around the educator\u0026rsquo;s neck. What kind of doing-doing is embedded in wearing a key this way? Notice that it is not merely a person carrying a key; the gesture produces effects that suggest ownership, that only she can open the door, that is, that she holds the power. On power relations and the multiplicity of relations between humans and non-humans, Latour (2012, p. 123) states the following:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen defining the quality control of ANT accounts, we must be extremely scrupulous and ascertain whether power and domination are indeed explained by the multiplicity of objects to which a central role is attributed and which are transported by empirically visible vehicles. It will not suffice for us to consider power and domination, in themselves, as a mysterious vault where that which moves the many participants of the action is enclosed.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe observed how leisure practices in institutional care settings are shaped by agencements that produce blockages, restrictions, and disputes around play, access to objects and spaces, and the very exercise of freedom. The ANT made it possible to understand that the \u0026ldquo;locked leisure\u0026rdquo; does not refer only to physical locks, such as those that lock rooms and toys, but also names a broader institutional logic that regulates leisure as an instrument of control, reward, or punishment. Within this logic, leisure ceases to be a guaranteed right and becomes something conditioned upon behaviors previously deemed \u0026ldquo;appropriate.\u0026rdquo; The symbolic locks, therefore, lock time, the body, and the children\u0026rsquo;s possibilities for action. The institutional actions observed show that practices inherited from the FEBEM, such as disciplinary rigidity and the centralization of power, continue to operate within the FPE network, restricting access to leisure as a way of disciplining behavior. However, the children also activate strategies and lines of flight, reconfiguring flows and revealing invisible agencies.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Conclusion","content":"\u003cp\u003eThis study showed that leisure, in the context of institutional care, cannot be understood as isolated practices, rights assured a priori, or fully guaranteed policies. By adopting ANT as an analytical lens, it was possible to follow leisure as the effects of heterogeneous networks composed of humans and non-humans, in motion. This approach made it possible to unravel established practices and identify the multiple agencements that sustain (or block) the leisure experienced by children and adolescents in care situations.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eArriving at the notion of leisure as an actor-network involved engaging with different conceptions of leisure, breaking with closed and essentialist definitions. This theoretical shift made it possible to reassemble the elements that constitute leisure practices and observe how they are reconfigured based on the density of the connections that sustain them. At the FPE, these practices sometimes appeared powerful, sometimes fragile, depending on the alliances established. With each activation of a network, through toys, spaces, rules, affections, decisions, and resistances, leisure possibilities were triggered.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe leisure that takes shape in the daily lives of the children and adolescents in this study, from playing in the yard to going to the cinema, from festivities to trips to the soccer stadium, from video games to outings to the square, is also a practice of radical insurgency. They not only produce ways of being in the world but also destabilize institutional logic, strain gendered norms, and call on the social to be rearranged based on the inventiveness of childhoods. Amid symbolic and material locks, these practices create cracks in what is established, opening gaps for other possible existences.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe locks observed, whether locking toys, bicycles, or behaviors, reveal how much institutional control still organizes access to leisure. However, while they lock, the institutions are also challenged by lines of flight traced by the children themselves, who reframe objects, spaces, and relationships. The agency of children and adolescents becomes visible where least expected, that is, in the gesture of switching locks, in the silent refusal of the norm, in the reinvention of meaning in the face of the rule. Opening the locks of the black box of leisure without purifying them through closed concepts made it possible to undertake the exercise of reaggregating the multiple elements that constitute their practices, generating effects different from those obtained by viewing them solely through the lenses of established leisure studies theories.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe conclude, therefore, that leisure in institutional care is not a neutral or harmonious territory. Leisure practices are fields of force and dispute that generate crises and instabilities. Recognizing leisure as an actor-network is to recognize the materiality of the bonds, absences, and resistances that make them possible. And, above all, it is to affirm that its potency lies less in its form than in its capacity to call the collective to create new networks of life, freedom, and imagination.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Declarations","content":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAll participants in the study \u0026quot;Unlocking Leisure: Ethnography in Institutional Care based on Actor-Network Theory,\u0026quot; including institutional workers and children in residential care, participated voluntarily and provided informed consent. Legal guardians of the children, as well as institutional representatives, signed formal consent forms approving their participation. The study was reviewed and approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (approval number 5.863.284; CAAE 65822422.9.0000.5347), and all procedures complied with Brazilian ethical guidelines, including Resolutions CNS 466/2012 and 510/2016. In the case of children, assent was also obtained through age-appropriate materials and procedures, in accordance with national ethical regulations.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"References","content":"\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBlackshaw, T. (2017). \u003cem\u003eRe-imagining leisure studies\u003c/em\u003e. New York: Routledge. \u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBoltanski, L. (2016). \u003cem\u003eSociologia cr\u0026iacute;tica ou sociologia da cr\u0026iacute;tica\u003c/em\u003e. In F. Vandenberghe \u0026amp; J. V\u0026eacute;ran (Orgs.), \u003cem\u003eAl\u0026eacute;m do habitus: teoria social p\u0026oacute;s-bourdieusiana\u003c/em\u003e (pp. 129\u0026ndash;154). 7Letras.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eByrne, S. \u003cem\u003eThe Right to Leisure for Children with Disabilities: Towards Greater Awareness and Implementation\u003c/em\u003e. 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CABI.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e"}],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":true,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":true,"hideJournal":true,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":true,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":false,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":false,"isPdf":false,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true},"keywords":"leisure, Actor-Network Theory, agency, institutional care, childhood","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-7285109/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7285109/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"Leisure practices can be viewed as hybrid networks of associations between humans and non-humans, as proposed by the Actor-Network Theory (ANT). We sought to investigate how children and adolescents in institutional care services construct leisure experiences through agencements, controversies, disputes, and negotiations. An ethnography based on ANT was conducted over 13 months. In institutional care services, leisure takes shape as practices of radical insurgency led by children and adolescents. Rules, objects, affects, documents, bodies, and spaces form unstable networks that make leisure possible in everyday institutional life. Leisure is materially and symbolically locked through institutional practices of social control. Nevertheless, the agency of children and adolescents creates cracks and opens gaps for lines of flight. By following the actor-network of leisure, this research contributes to expanding the analytical frameworks of leisure studies, repositioning leisure as a performative, situated practice traversed by disputes and advancing an original contribution to the theoretical foundations of the sociology of leisure by mobilizing Actor-Network Theory.","manuscriptTitle":"Unlocking Leisure: Ethnography in Institutional Care based on Actor-Network Theory","msid":"","msnumber":"","nonDraftVersions":[{"code":1,"date":"2025-08-07 08:58:52","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-7285109/v1","editorialEvents":[{"type":"communityComments","content":0}],"status":"published","journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true}}],"origin":"","ownerIdentity":"18b63239-f7bd-4d8e-854a-b6ee33a4889f","owner":[],"postedDate":"August 7th, 2025","published":true,"recentEditorialEvents":[],"rejectedJournal":[],"revision":"","amendment":"","status":"posted","subjectAreas":[],"tags":[],"updatedAt":"2026-02-23T16:08:34+00:00","versionOfRecord":{"articleIdentity":"rs-7285109","link":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s41978-026-00201-2","journal":{"identity":"international-journal-of-the-sociology-of-leisure","isVorOnly":false,"title":"International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure"},"publishedOn":"2026-02-18 15:58:48","publishedOnDateReadable":"February 18th, 2026"},"versionCreatedAt":"2025-08-07 08:58:52","video":"","vorDoi":"10.1007/s41978-026-00201-2","vorDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s41978-026-00201-2","workflowStages":[]},"version":"v1","identity":"rs-7285109","journalConfig":"researchsquare"},"__N_SSP":true},"page":"/article/[identity]/[[...version]]","query":{"redirect":"/article/rs-7285109","identity":"rs-7285109","version":["v1"]},"buildId":"8U1c8b4HqxoKbykW_rLl7","isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[84888],"gssp":true,"scriptLoader":[]}