Speakers
Description
The climbing community is vibrant and diverse, yet the historic archives do not reflect this. Previously, sociologists have scrutinised historians over a lack of criticality and theoretical framing in their research, and historians have shown disdain for the restrictive nature of social theory. This paper argues that the practice of building an on-the-record, publicly accessible oral history archive can be used to ‘do sociology’ which is accessible to and serves the climbing public. We draw on data that records women and gender diverse people’s experiences of climbing in the UK, underpinned by a poststructural feminist approach and drawing on a framework of intersectionality. This epistemological framing is used to generate interview data with [cisgender and transgender] women, non-binary people, people who were assigned female at birth and intersex people, excluding cisgender men, to generate recordings of experience that are reflective of the current climbing community where binary gender is losing relevance. Participants are given space to comment critically on aspects of climbing ecologies, community, space and culture which facilitates the exploration of how dominant power relations impact on the experience and wellbeing of women and gender diverse climbers. Thus, resulting in an historical record that more accurately represents those being researched, encourages criticality, and can be publicly accessed to understand complex factors that influence this community’s experiences, and subsequently drawn on by policy makers and NGBs to act on pertinent issues.
