Forum Talk: Trace, Place & Space: Swimming as a salutogenic practice
Speaker: Ronan Foley, Associate Professor, Geography, Maynooth University
Abstract: Within geographies of health and wellbeing, there is renewed interest in how healthenabling spaces and places are assembled, maintained and reproduced through occupation and practice. With a specific interest in blue space practices, this paper utilises the concept of trace to consider embodied, emotional and experiential dimensions of swimming. The work is informed by oral testimonies and swim-along interviews from different Irish blue spaces including, lakes, rivers and seas. The swimalong interviews incorporated the use of action cameras and a spatial video app, Ubipix, that captured and recorded the specific traces of the swims. In better understanding how trace works to promote health and wellbeing, three examples from the research are suggested. Firstly, embodied traces operating between the body and the water containing both clear and blurred, even unhealthy examples. Secondly, emotional traces, both immediate and recurring, providing an affective connection between and across senses in the water, and thirdly, experiential traces, identifiable through memory, family, place histories and individual and collective immersions in the water. Each trace frames swimming as a practice that is salutogenic. Salutogenesis, a central concept in health promotion, considers the idea of health as a braided stream, where ‘upstream’ health works best across the lifecourse with control, coherence and meaning as key components. Tracing swimmers and their swims uncovers these key components as the emerge in immersions in all kinds of waters, marine, riverine and lacustrine.
