What’s fun got to do with it? What fun-life contexts teach us about the bounds of context

The panel will be presented in three parts. For the first part, as a 10-minute introduction, each panellist will briefly present key contexts where they have observed fun in their research. Audience members will be invited by the moderator to share where they have observed an interaction of fun and information. The second part will take one hour, and will include a 7-minute presentation from each panellist, followed by 10 minutes of audience prompts. The first three panellists will each define a relevant term (fun, serious, and context) before inviting feedback from the audience. The fourth panellist will introduce the question, what can we learn from the bounds of fun-life contexts to studying information behaviour? Rather than finishing with audience prompts, the last presentation will immediately segue into the third part: a 20-minute discussion of the central question that includes the panel and audience, and led by the moderator. The discussion and panel will conclude with a review of the themes, a Q&A, and what comes next. The purpose of this panel is to explore the concept of context through the examples of the bounds of fun-life contexts. Fun is an often used but rarely defined term. Instead many scholars such as Hartel (2003) have used terms like serious leisure to articulate a specific context of interest to Library and Information Science scholars. This panel will explore the bounds of fun and fun-life contexts to explore what context means and how important are our definitions and boundaries.