Lifestyle
The Lifestyle directs research towards identities and diversity. Lack of cultural diversity is recognised by many communities and organisations that promote rural life and access, though these groups sometimes struggle to offer practical solutions. In contrast, new groups of global majority-led grassroots outdoors leisure organisations are emerging, demonstrating the diversity of enthusiasm for rural experiences. These groups also encounter rural lifestyles and leisure spaces already riven with unwritten conflicts over leisure rights, types of activity, behaviours and competing visions of rural space. Yet rural leisure and lifestyle can also be challenging for other intersectional communities – women, disabled people, LGBTQI+ identities, and minority religious communities have all had central roles in the definition of the UKs many forms of ‘outdoors’, ‘countryside’, rural lifestyles and communities, yet often find themselves needing to reclaim this heritage. Doctoral scholars working in this theme will focus their research on such intersectionalities, including the relevance of more-than-human connections for their definition and sense of belonging.
Projects in this theme might investigate:
- Conflicts and contradictions in outdoors leisure: conflicts between new and old activities, hyper-modern technologies to enable an escape from modern life, risk and adventure as a means to calm escape, tokenism and diversity, medicalisation of diverse modes of enjoyment.
- Hidden barriers and enablers to rural lifestyles and/or leisure – particularly the circumventing of access regimes on the basis of tolerated activities or (elite) groups, unequal epistemologies of legal rights or informal exclusions, but also rural-led initiatives, entrepreneurial change and relationships with urban-led access advocates for poorly-represented groups in outdoors leisure.
- Itinerant identities – exploring especially the rarely-acknowledged, but still crucial pool of seasonal migrant labour to rural economies, including non-UK labour, traveller/Roma communities and other mobile communities.
- Gender intersections: rural lifestyles of, for example, global majority women, disabled LGBTQI+ individuals, or women living in rural poverty.
- How we might use more-than-human encounters to stimulate meaningful practices and dialogue, and chart the complex codes, worldviews and cultural norms that regulate leisure in the outdoors.
SURF
William Smith Building
Keele University
Keele
Staffordshire
ST5 5BG
Email: surf@keele.ac.uk
Admissions enquiries: enquiries@keele.ac.uk