Luiz Antonio Simas’s Thought and Leisure Studies

Connections, Approximations, and New Pathways

Abstract

In this article, we seek to bring Luiz Antonio Simas's thinking closer to the field of Leisure Studies. We specifically relate themes and concepts that provoke alternative perspectives on carnival, football, and education. Written collectively, we chose a narrative style that also conveys our encounters with the author and expresses how we were affected by his work. Simas is a historian, writer, and elementary school teacher who, alongside other scholars, reflects on and proposes worldviews grounded in everyday experiences commonly associated with popular culture. Beyond his ideas expressed in prose, poetry, and chronicles, orality is a key dimension of his way of thinking, seeing the world, and presenting a Brazil shaped at the margins of dominant power structures. This text aims to bring to Leisure Studies a desire for dialogue with his thinking, using as reference some of his works, public lectures, and interviews, in the temporality in which they reached us and helped shape us as a study group. In doing so, we aim to share pathways for possible academic dialogues, particularly regarding the body in its different expressions within leisure experiences.