I've been out of the Looking Sideways loop for a while and am slowly catching up on the conversations and really enjoyed listening to this one! Lesley is so clearly a generous, contextualised and careful thinker, which is exactly the kind of person scholarship always learns and benefits from. I liked the contextualisation of the word 'traditional', which is associated with conservatism, but, as Lesley showed, is a remnant of the early years of both the activities and the critical scholarship about the activities. But then Lesley's work forensically shows how there is something different about these outdoor, nature-based sports (including those in urban, concrete nature) that does differentiate them - just as activities like yoga and martial arts based in cultural and spiritual practice are different again. This work will be so useful for the high performance worlds of coaching, training, psych, and organisation as they are still clearly trying to trade off the difference while forcing athletes into conforming with the established (capitalist) structures in place.
I found the chat about rules really interesting as well, but I think there is something sticky in there that is about how various sports/activities/cultures operate outside of the high performance realm, and how we continue to assume that the elite versions of the sports have any cultural bearing on the everyday/recreational versions. My uncertain use of lists there is an illustration of that stickiness - when is snowboarding (surfing, skating, etc) a sport, and when isn't it? I've never been able to get to the bottom of that because participants themselves slide around these words. But mostly, they would never see it as a sport. I have friends who are elite, world level competitors who make sense of their participation by seeing the competitive side as a completely seperate form of participation. One surfer friend is unrecognisable to me in the water when she is competing! She is a hyper-competitive person and athlete, so she loves competing, but her preferred surfing is a session (where she still is competitive and dominates by her surfing is free and stylish). I mean other sports are similar in these terms - social soccer and shift rules to be more inclusive, and the point of such games might not be about "competing" at all, so much as connecting to folk and friends and places. These ways of playing are very hard to relate to professional, high-performance versions of football.
As you discussed, the "rules" os action sports are so different and often non-existent until.... You think in a cultural approach, where lineups, norms and hierarchies reign supreme. A lineup, a skatepark, a mountain have "rules", but they're cultural.
Anyway, I was thinking a lot as I listened and love seeing how the world of action sports research continues to grow and shift and evolve and build, and Lesley's brilliant work is a wonderful and important part of that.
I've been out of the Looking Sideways loop for a while and am slowly catching up on the conversations and really enjoyed listening to this one! Lesley is so clearly a generous, contextualised and careful thinker, which is exactly the kind of person scholarship always learns and benefits from. I liked the contextualisation of the word 'traditional', which is associated with conservatism, but, as Lesley showed, is a remnant of the early years of both the activities and the critical scholarship about the activities. But then Lesley's work forensically shows how there is something different about these outdoor, nature-based sports (including those in urban, concrete nature) that does differentiate them - just as activities like yoga and martial arts based in cultural and spiritual practice are different again. This work will be so useful for the high performance worlds of coaching, training, psych, and organisation as they are still clearly trying to trade off the difference while forcing athletes into conforming with the established (capitalist) structures in place.
I found the chat about rules really interesting as well, but I think there is something sticky in there that is about how various sports/activities/cultures operate outside of the high performance realm, and how we continue to assume that the elite versions of the sports have any cultural bearing on the everyday/recreational versions. My uncertain use of lists there is an illustration of that stickiness - when is snowboarding (surfing, skating, etc) a sport, and when isn't it? I've never been able to get to the bottom of that because participants themselves slide around these words. But mostly, they would never see it as a sport. I have friends who are elite, world level competitors who make sense of their participation by seeing the competitive side as a completely seperate form of participation. One surfer friend is unrecognisable to me in the water when she is competing! She is a hyper-competitive person and athlete, so she loves competing, but her preferred surfing is a session (where she still is competitive and dominates by her surfing is free and stylish). I mean other sports are similar in these terms - social soccer and shift rules to be more inclusive, and the point of such games might not be about "competing" at all, so much as connecting to folk and friends and places. These ways of playing are very hard to relate to professional, high-performance versions of football.
As you discussed, the "rules" os action sports are so different and often non-existent until.... You think in a cultural approach, where lineups, norms and hierarchies reign supreme. A lineup, a skatepark, a mountain have "rules", but they're cultural.
Anyway, I was thinking a lot as I listened and love seeing how the world of action sports research continues to grow and shift and evolve and build, and Lesley's brilliant work is a wonderful and important part of that.