| dc.description.abstract | Outdoor rock climbing – a human practice aimed at mastering the rock face? A battle? An embodied practice in conversation with the landscape? A relationship between climber and rock? A practice deeply embedded in an agentic and lively world? Rock climbing can be conceived in various ways depending on the chosen perspective. Thus far, dominant discourses focus on the human aspects of outdoor rock climbing, limited by human-centred worldviews and conceptualisations, reinforcing dualist human–“nature” perspectives. Considering climate change, mass extinction and biodiversity loss, more and more scholars are challenging dominant discourses and assumptions regarding human relations to the environment, aiming to move beyond problematic dualisms that shape our world. In that context, this thesis explores how we might rethink rock climbers’ moving bodies and rock climbing within the material-discursive context of outdoor adventure sports by decentring the human in favour of more-than-human agency and relational material processes.
By employing a relational materialist framework, this thesis attempts to move beyond taken-for-granted human supremacy, assuming a world constituted of more-than-human processes, agential matter, entanglement, and intra-action.
The empirical materials that inform this inquiry were gathered through focus group conversations and observations during a six-day long rock climbing trip to Spain, where eight climbers engaged in the project of climbing one selected route. In a continuous process, the empirical materials were analysed using diffractive reading and thinking with theory to attend to the entanglements, intra-action and more-than-human processes and their effects. The analysis revealed climbers’ complex intra-action and entanglement with their equipment, with the geophysical place and their corporeality, leading to differentiation within and the process of becoming-climbed-rock. Thus, the findings emphasise the human embeddedness in a more-than-human world and the agency of matter.
These insights are discussed against why such thinking is essential in contemporary precarious times. Drawing on Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology, this thesis emphasises the responsibility and the importance of the ability to respond that arises once we recognise our embeddedness in a more-than-human world.
This raises questions regarding power dynamics that shape our world, determining whose voice is heard and accounted for. Recognising the inevitable co-existence with a more-than-human world thus influences how to live ethically in precarious times. In the face of injustice, climate change and mass extinction, these considerations encourage re-envisioning our current relationship with the world, emphasising our responsibility.
Finally, this research opens new avenues for further exploration, urging us to delve deeper into the underlying assumptions that drive actions towards environmentally responsible relations and practices. It prompts us to question what other ethical and political implications arise from the realisation that humans are always already immersed in, exposed to, and composed of the substances that make the world. | |