Call for Papers

 

The Great Outdoors?

 

A session of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual Conference

Manchester, 26-28^th August 2009

Sponsored by the Rural Geography Research Group

 

 

To offer a paper to the session, submit your details (name, institution, email address) and an abstract (max. 250 words) to [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] by Friday 23^rd January 2009.

 

Session organisers: Pauline Couper (University College Plymouth St Mark & St John) and Richard Yarwood (University of Plymouth)

 

This session examines the geographies of ‘the great outdoors’. Given advances in technologies and the increased accessibility of wild areas, can the outdoors still be thought of as ‘great’? Or have new cultures and practices of outdoor leisure,  from mountain boarding to extreme ironing, transformed it to the ‘wicked’ or ‘cool’ outdoors? What barriers remain to accessing outdoor space? Do sedentary lifestyles mean that the outdoors is experienced more from the armchair rather than the hilltop? What alternative, perhaps darker, visions exist of the outdoors? How can the theory and practice of geography contribute to understandings of people and nature in outdoor places?

 

The sixtieth anniversary of National Parks in England and Wales seems a suitable time to reflect critically on the outdoors. Recent decades have seen a rapid expansion of the outdoor ‘industry’ and subsequently its academic study, with academic journals and degree programmes focused on the ‘outdoors’.  As the ‘Great Outdoors’ becomes established as a field of academic enquiry in its own right, what contribution is, could, and perhaps even should, geography be making?  We therefore encourage papers about (but not limited to):

 

·     Critiques of the ‘Great Outdoors’ and ‘Wilderness’;

·     The ‘dark’ or ‘alternative’ ruralities of the outdoors;

·     Exploration, Geography and the Great Outdoors;

·      Social, cultural and political barriers to the outdoors;

·     Geographical perspectives on the hybrid networks of outdoor leisure and its management;

·     Geographical contributions to the practices and performances of being outdoors.