Justin Harmon

  • Assistant Professor
  • Community and Therapeutic Recreation, UNCG

Justin Harmon, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community and Therapeutic Recreation. Harmon has worked extensively in the parks, forestry and recreation fields, and has a diverse background in practice that includes land and wildlife management, environmental and primary education, event planning, and community relations and outreach. He has explored community as an area of research in numerous regions and contexts, as well as through numerous theoretical lenses and epistemologies. His primary research lines focus on health and aging broadly, and specifically in regards to the use of leisure for coping and identity maintenance for people with serious and terminal diseases, and the use of music for affecting quality of life and life course development. His research can be found in the journals Annals of Leisure Research, Leisure/Loisir, World Leisure Journal and Leisure Sciences to name a few. When not in the classroom he can be found in the backyard or forest with his dog, at a concert, or in the yoga studio. A really good day sees the intersection of all of those!

There are 28 included publications by Justin Harmon :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Becoming Political: An Expanding Role for Critical Leisure Studies 2019 127 This article explores the intersection of politics and leisure, pointing to the fact that power has always been present in leisure activities, settings, practices, and institutions. In noting some of the past contributions of leisure scholarship, it ...
Building a life note-by-note: music and the life course 2018 946 Music is an omnipresent component of many people's lives. On an individual level it is used to set moods, mark milestones, and connect to one's personal history. At a collective level music marks the concerns of cultural heritage, national holidays a...
Celebrate the Trail to Recovery: Power of the positive post-diagnosis of cancer 2018 885 This paper explored how those in treatment for cancer, or in remission from it, benefitted from participation in a weekly hiking program. Fredrickson’s (2001) broaden-and-build concept was used to structure and demonstrate the ability of participants...
Community, family and leisure immersion 2016 1296 This study explores the ambiguous term ‘community’ and how close groups of people come to form one. By extracting two core elements, often attributed to designations of community, mutual affection and shared appreciation, this study elucidates how fa...
Connecting to the trail: Natural spaces as places of healing 2020 845 The concept of “place” has been explored for decades, examining how specific geographic locales impact social meanings and interactions, sentimentality associated with a specific environment, and the construction of identity through prolonged place i...
Couples and shared leisure experiences 2016 1831 This paper explored how romantic couples’ involvement in a music scene affected both individual and mutual enjoyment during participation which stimulated the desire for future shared leisure experiences. As all aspects of involvement were seen as la...
Cultivating self-reliance: Participation in urban agriculture as civil leisure 2019 172 Using ethnographic methods, the present study explored volunteer participation in an urban farm in Austin, Texas, USA. Researchers spent three years documenting the activities of participants via participant observation and interviewing. Guided by th...
A death in the “family”: Community embodiment of tragedy 2018 161 This manuscript explores how a tightknit music fan community responds to the suicide of one of its members. During the grieving process the music and music scene of the band Rust Forever are relied on for catharsis and healing, and the memories and l...
The ephemerality of community 2019 218 On the last night of the Bandito's Run in Virginia City, Montana, the band (Jerry Joseph & the Jackmormons) was basically breaking up. Sure, they were going to replace JR on bass, but all the fans knew the music would never quite be the same. For one...
The extended leisure experiences of music scene participation 2017 936 Scott and Harmon coined the term extended leisure experiences (ELEs) to describe ‘activities that participants engage in following a primary leisure activity’. In this study, we set out to elucidate the ELE of fan participation in the music scene of ...
Extended Leisure Experiences: A Sociological Conceptualization 2016 1286 Our interest in this research reflection is to introduce what we call extended leisure experiences—activities that leisure participants engage in following the completion of a primary leisure activity. Our approach is largely descriptive and explorat...
Extending the leisure substitutability concept 2016 1338 Leisure commitment has been studied for several decades now, but few attempts have been made to look at how leisurists benefit from participation in one activity when it comes to selecting another, but related, activity. The concept of leisure substi...
Finding fear and loathing in Las Vegas 2019 1297 Casinos serve as the proverbial devil on the shoulder to strengthen the convictions – and addictions – of those who have succumbed to the controlling mechanisms of casino culture, and the tangential addictions that often accompany gambling disorders....
Gonzo autoethnography: The story of Monkey 2018 1102 The present study explores the norms of community that are re/produced in the liminal leisure space of a formerly fan-organized music festival. Guided by the concept of communitas, we examined the manner in which fans attempted to exercise their agen...
Growing in place: the interplay of urban agriculture and place sentiment 2014 676 In this investigation, we drew from social constructivist understandings of place to explore both the meanings participants of an urban garden project in Austin, Texas, ascribed to place and the sentiment they attached to those meanings. Specifically...
Leisure participation, substance abuse disorders, and recovery 2017 2350 The purpose of this paper was to explore the lived experiences of people with substance abuse disorders over the course of their lengthy participation in a music scene. When the use of drugs and alcohol either begins or is enabled in a leisure contex...
Leisure Studies in America and the quandary of the “experience economy” 2019 974 This study set out to explore the origins of leisure studies in the United States largely from the perspectives of eighteen veteran scholars in the field. Leisure studies, much like other fields of inquiry, is one that was born from parent discipline...
Leisure studies is for experience, not for industry 2018 865 In the last decade, some in the field of leisure studies have embraced the experience economy/industry model introduced by Pine and Gilmore (2011) in the late 1990s. While tenets of the experience industry can be found earlier in leisure studies, esp...
The Long Strange Trip Continues: Aging Deadheads 2014 630 The community surrounding the Grateful Dead, a San Francisco-based psychedelic rock band that had played together for thirty years when its lead guitarist Jerry Garcia died in 1995, still persists. For many Deadheads, as these fans are called, member...
Positive emotions and passionate leisure involvement 2015 1292 Music is commonly linked to moments of remembrance, joy, celebration and bonding. This paper explores how middle-aged participants in a music scene use the various aspects of their involvement to create and store positive emotions cultivated through ...
Pulling survivors from the wreckage: Resuscitating rejected papers 2019 772 My1 initial attempt at a first-authored paper was quite the adventure. I was in the midst of dissertation data collection and my early focus was on the intersection of secular spirituality and music. Someone I had met at a conference forwarded me a C...
Rebuttal to Lundberg’s response paper 2018 142 Lundberg (2018, this issue) provides a thoughtful rejoinder to the article, “Leisure is for Experience, Not Industry” (this issue), one that was surely intended to add clarity and support for the experience industry model of Pine and Gilmore (2011) a...
Restorative Rhythms: drumming as healing 2019 2091 Thirty people who were either in treatment, or in remission, from cancer and their caregivers participated in a therapeutic drumming clinic called Restorative Rhythms. As music has been proposed as a significant way to reduce stress and stimulate fee...
The right to exist: Homelessness and the paradox of leisure 2019 1632 This essay explores one man’s life as a person experiencing homelessness and the societal impositions (stigma) and barriers (criminal ordinances) that shape his sense of self and perceived ability to transcend homelessness. The focus is on trying to ...
Spirituality, Fan Culture, and the Music of Jerry Joseph & the Jackmormons 2016 1692 This article presents findings from a qualitative study with passionate fans of the rock and roll band, Jerry Joseph & the Jackmormons. The study looked at how fan involvement in the music scene enhanced quality of life through the ability to access ...
Tell cancer to take a hike: post traumatic growth on the trail to recovery 2019 883 This study focuses on posttraumatic growth (PTG) in patients and survivors of cancer through their participation in a hiking program. Major life crises like cancer can significantly challenge or destroy one’s sense of self, thus necessitating the nee...
The temporal phases of leisure experience: Expectation, experience and reflection of leisure participation 2017 2185 While there have been studies whereby the methodology relied on evaluations of pre-, during, and postparticipation experiences, it is far more common that research on leisure does not consider the temporal phases of a leisure experience. Further, man...
Tuesdays with Worry: Appreciating nature with a dog at the end of life 2018 1015 Dogs have been called ‘social lubricants’ for their uncanny ability to help people with serious illnesses and trauma find brief moments of catharsis, create meaningful relationships when there are none and connect with healthcare providers and other ...