2nd CFP RGS-IBG 2010: Getting away from it all - Embodied practices and
engagements with the 'natural'
Sessions co-sponsored by Women and Geography Study Group (WGSG)
Social and Cultural Geography Research Group (SCGRG)
This session examines the notion that we endeavour to ‘get away from it all’
during embodied engagements with ‘natural landscapes’. Multiple claims are
made of the restorative properties of “getting back to the environment” (Eden
2009: 2037), and the promotion of outdoor practices has been seen as a
logical step to fulfil a diverse range of policy objectives. This covers a range of
practices such as walking or canoeing, making sandcastles on the beach and
doing yoga in the woods. Notwithstanding political aims, outdoor practices
themselves may be associated with discourses of health, well-being,
romanticism, nationhood, gender, individualism and social class.
Practices are surrounded by intertextual cultures and technologies which
shape embodied experience of the outdoors. Indeed it has been observed that
the environment we are getting back to is an increasingly technologised
environment in which we are equipped with, and surrounded by, ever more
sophisticated (but often mundane) socio-technical assemblages with myriad
experiential possibilities. The development of technologies of outdoor apparel
and equipment offers new ways of thinking about the relationship between
bodies and landscapes, where tensions between comfort and discomfort, and
the manipulation of capacities of bodies are played out through the mediation
of various technologies.
Claims over the right to put the self at risk in the outdoors are also central to
many of these practices. Traditionally these anxieties have been focused upon
the ill-prepared or inexperienced, but they are increasingly targeted at
proficient outdoor enthusiasts. Certain established outdoor cultures and
institutions have also criticised the rise in way-marked paths and their
proposed incursion into more remote mountain areas of the UK. This has been
accompanied by the idea that a generalised promotion of outdoor pursuits
leads to an increase in dilettantes whose lack of understanding of the pursuits
bestow them with a degraded experience, which is seen as detrimental to the
particular ideals that outdoor cultures hold when they wish to ‘get away from
it all’.
For this session we seek papers that focus upon engagements with nature to
explore the ‘outdoor body’ as a way of considering the following potential
themes:
• Hybrid engagements with ‘nature’
• Technologies and bodies
• Professionalisation and technologisation of outdoor practices
• Gender and outdoor practices
• Engagements with ‘therapeutic landscapes’ and restorative engagements
with ‘nature’
• Affective encounters with the outdoors
• Danger, risk, access and the politics of nature practices
• Changing outdoor cultures and new ‘nature-cultures’
• Historical and cultural geographies of the outdoor body Abstracts of 250
words (maximum) should be submitted to Paul Barratt
([log in to unmask]) and/or Leila Dawney ([log in to unmask])
by 29th January 2010.
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