Becoming With Outdoor Swimming : Connections, Knowledges and Environmentalisms, and the Implications for Swimmers’ Health and the Health of the Outdoor Swimming Assemblage

Lafbery, Abi and Spurling, Nicola (2025) Becoming With Outdoor Swimming : Connections, Knowledges and Environmentalisms, and the Implications for Swimmers’ Health and the Health of the Outdoor Swimming Assemblage. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

‘Becoming With Outdoor Swimming’ is an ethnography of outdoor swimming practice in the North West of England. Swimmers’ bodies, water, flora, fauna, pollution, weather, climate, and more, are explored through a drawing together of strands of autoethnography, sensory and digital ethnographies, in-the-water, and on-land interviews, and participant photography. The thesis is informed by the fields of Feminist Theory, Material Feminisms, Hydro-Feminism, and others, to interpret outdoor swimming as a relational assemblage in which all constituents affect and are affected by one another, and are engaged in processes of becoming. This understanding extends existing scholarship on the physiological becoming of outdoor swimmers (Throsby, 2016), by proposing two further kinds of becoming which can occur in the practice: ‘Intellectual Becoming’ and ‘Becoming Wild’. Whilst previous literatures are focussed on the health of outdoor swimmers, this thesis attends to the co-constitution of the swimmers’ health and the health of the water, flora, and fauna of the outdoor swimming assemblage. By situating the practice in the mental health and ecological health crises occurring in the UK, it hopes to contribute to wider conversations about how to live well as part of a multispecies community in crisis. Through rich empirical material of fresh and saltwater environments, the thesis establishes how swimmers can develop feelings of connection to their bodies, sense of selves and the wider assemblage, and how the practice can engender manifestations of wildness, which affect how swimmers experience themselves and their waterscapes. It is determined that through aquatic knowledge production, swimmers are both immersed and implicated in contemporary environmental debates, specifically water quality and climate change. The thesis documents how swimmers are attempting to navigate unclean waters, and the nexus of health, commodification and environmentalisms, which have emerged during the practice’s rise in popularity in recent years.