FINAL CFP RGS-IBG 2010: Getting away from it all - Embodied practices and
engagements with the 'natural'
We've had some really interesting abstracts from our previous calls, but
have decided to extend the deadline to Friday 5th February. So if there are
any late abstract submitters out there, it's not too late...details below:
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 5th February 2010.
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