Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH

Increasingly, scholars link dominating perceptions and anthropocentric worldviews to the troublesome events of human-induced climate change and interconnected social crises. This research responds to the call for an ontological shift, aiming to leave the Cartesian lineage of thought that dominates contemporary Western thinking and being, by exploring what possibilities may emerge from decentring the human in favour of more-than-human processes and the agency of matter in the context of outdoor rock-climbing. This paper draws on qualitative data from focus group interviews and observations of a group of rock-climbers based on their experiences from a six-day outdoor rock-climbing event in Spain. We employ a relational materialist approach to collect and analyse the empirical materials, focusing on becoming and the agency of matter to rethink the relationship between humans and the environment. The relational materialist analysis leads to ethical considerations in the face of precarious environmental times. Our findings suggest that climbers are always already entangled in place, pointing to the gap between outdoor rock-climbing discourses and embodied practice. As such, we conceptualise climbing as a process shaped by entangled, technologically mediated more-than-human processes rather than a product of human domination and superiority over nature. This perspective makes the separation of humans and the environment impossible. Thus, we suggest that the relational material perspective fosters ethically responsible research practices by engaging with the often overlooked more-than-human elements and consequently increases the attentiveness to material relationships in outdoor adventure sports discourses that go beyond dominant human-centred conceptualisations.

An ongoing discussion is a debate about the benefits of outdoor activities for health, where a narrowness regarding the benefits as a matter of curing or preventing disease has been questioned. Hence, there is an urgent need to theorize further the relationship between outdoor activities and health with robust theoretical frameworks that can guide research and practice, taking different aspects of human-nature relations into account. In the paper, a critique of pathogenic perspectives of health is forwarded, as well as a critique of an anthropocentric human centeredness of health. Instead, a salutogenic model and the metaphor of the swimmer in the river is used to discuss the relation without being restricted to health as the absence of disease or to human health and wellbeing. In the paper, seven different relations, or salutogenic questions, are provided, moving from the swimmer in the foreground, to swimmers in the river to finally foregrounding the river.

I det här kapitlet diskuteras friluftsliv som utbildnings- och samhällsfenomen, utifrån ett humanistiskt och beteendevetenskaplig tidrottsperspektiv. I en bok om idrottsforskning kan det tyckas märkligt att inkludera ett kapitel om friluftsliv. Som vi vill visa i detta kapitel finns det dock skäl till att det kan se ut så i den svenska kontexten, åtminstone inom den humanistiska och beteendevetenskapliga idrottsforskningen. I kapitlet presenterar vi den forskning som bedrivits på temat friluftsliv inom svensk humanistisk- och beteendevetenskaplig idrottsforskning över de senaste femtio åren. Vi inkluderar forskning om friluftsliv kopplat till skolämnet idrott och hälsa men, för att sätta in denna i en samhällskontext, inkluderar vi också forskning om friluftsliv som ett bredare samhällsfenomen. Vår ambition är att ge dig som läsare en övergripande bild genom att mer översiktligt presentera innehållet och de viktigaste forskningsresultaten i avhandlingar och annan forskning som lagts fram.

Western human-centered worldviews, such as colonialism, have re-shaped landscapes extensively, and in doing so, have marginalised and subjugated the land, its inhabitants and less dominant perspectives. Many of us in outdoor environmental education (OEE) work in colonised landscapes and have opportunities to attend to them in more equitable ways. Our aim in this chapter is to introduce the concept of reading landscapes and promote ways of decolonising/deanthropocentrising approaches to understanding landscapes. We argue that there is no one way of reading landscapes and, as such, three threads run through the chapter. Firstly, the way we participate with landscapes influences how we might read them. Secondly, that our worldview affects our engagements with places. And thirdly, that theoretical perspectives/frameworks can guide our pedagogical approaches. To situate these ideas in practice, we offer four examples that embed some of these ideas in the landscapes we work. This does not offer a consensus on the practice of reading landscapes, but instead presents a rhizomatic approach to exploring how some experienced educators have engaged with the idea in their different contexts.