Leisure reading and reader engagement refer to the voluntary, self-directed practices through which individuals select, interpret, and respond to texts beyond compulsory educational or occupational requirements. Leisure reading encompasses a wide range of genres, formats, and platforms—including print fiction and non-fiction, poetry, graphic narratives, fan fiction, audiobooks, and digital texts—while reader engagement captures the cognitive, emotional, social, and embodied dimensions of reading experiences. Together, these concepts foreground reading not only as a technical skill but as a cultural, affective, and relational practice shaped by identity, community, and context.
The study of leisure reading draws on diverse intellectual traditions. Reader-response theory conceptualised reading as a transactional process between reader and text, emphasising lived experience and interpretation. Sociocultural theories of literacy have highlighted reading as embedded in social practices and power relations rather than as a neutral or universal skill. Research on motivation and engagement in educational psychology has further explored how autonomy, interest, and identity shape sustained reading habits. Contemporary scholarship extends these traditions by examining digital reading cultures, participatory fandoms, algorithmically mediated book discovery, and the shifting boundaries between reading, listening, viewing, and interactive storytelling.
Leisure reading is frequently associated with a range of cognitive, social, and emotional outcomes, including vocabulary development, empathy, imagination, stress reduction, and wellbeing. However, access to time, space, materials, and supportive reading cultures is unevenly distributed. Patterns of leisure reading reflect broader inequalities related to class, race, language, disability, gender, and geography, as well as transformations in publishing industries and digital infrastructures. While public discourse often frames declining reading rates as a crisis, such narratives may overlook evolving forms of textual engagement, including online communities, audiobooks, and multimodal storytelling. Critical analysis is therefore essential to understand how reader engagement is cultivated, constrained, and redefined across diverse contexts.
This Collection examines leisure reading and reader engagement across the lifespan and in varied cultural settings. We invite research that explores how individuals and communities experience, value, and sustain reading beyond formal requirements, and how these practices intersect with education, technology, publishing, and public policy. We particularly welcome scholarship that interrogates the social meanings of reading, the dynamics of engagement and disengagement, and the implications of leisure reading for identity, equity, and participation in cultural life.
Research is invited on a range of themes, including but not limited to:
- Conceptualisations of leisure reading and engagement: Theoretical frameworks for understanding aesthetic, affective, and participatory reading; distinctions between recreational, voluntary, and self-selected reading.
- Motivation, identity, and belonging: How interest, self-concept, cultural representation, and peer networks shape reading practices across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
- Digital reading cultures: E-books, audiobooks, online fan communities, social media book cultures (e.g., BookTok), and algorithm-driven recommendation systems.
- Equity and access: Libraries, community initiatives, language diversity, disability access, and the material conditions that enable or constrain leisure reading.
- Family and intergenerational reading practices: Shared reading, home literacy environments, and cultural transmission through storytelling.
- Reader engagement in educational contexts: Independent reading programmes, reading for pleasure initiatives, and the relationship between voluntary reading and academic outcomes.
- Publishing, markets, and cultural production: Industry trends, representation in children’s and young adult literature, and the role of independent presses and self-publishing.
- Wellbeing and mental health: The role of leisure reading in stress reduction, resilience, bibliotherapy, and emotional regulation.
- Global and comparative perspectives: Leisure reading practices across linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical contexts.
Submissions are encouraged from education studies, literacy studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, media and cultural studies, library and information science, publishing studies, and related fields. Interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse contributions—qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, theoretical, and practice-based—are particularly welcome.
Editors
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