Date/Time
Thursday
9 Apr 2026
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location
470 Stephens Hall
Event Type
Colloquium
Roland Betancourt
Chancellor’s Professor of Art History, UC Irvine
This talk traces the convergence of the amusement parks’ rehabilitation after WWII and the revitalized “problem of leisure” reframed around the automation panic of the 1950s. While intellectuals debated what meaningful leisure should look like, often reprising arguments from the 1920s and ’30s with striking cultural amnesia, amusement parks were already answering the question in practice by packaging their commercial offerings as educational, participatory, and family-oriented. The emergence of the “theme park,” as epitomized by Disneyland, embodied this resolution. Complementing histories that treat automation’s acceptance as a story of labor, policy, or corporate strategy, the aesthetic and the experiential emerge here as the consequential historical agents: the amusement park industry settled the leisure debate by acclimating Americans to automated systems through pleasurable, built environments.
