Leisure Activities in the Outdoors: Learning, Developing and Challenging

The benefits of being outdoors in a leisure context are widely acknowledged across a range of disciplinary perspectives (including tourism, therapeutics, education and recreation). These benefits include the development of: health and wellbeing; social skills; leadership and facilitation skills; personal, emotional and reflective abilities; confidence and identity creation.Drawing on a variety of perspectives, geographies and approaches, this book explores the opportunities that leisure in the outdoors provides for learning, developing and challenging. The authors in this collection challenge dominant discourses of outdoor leisure through their selection of outdoor activities, theoretical approaches and modes of representation. All offer fresh insights and thinking into how leisure in the outdoors can be understood. The book covers a range of outdoor conceptualisations that challenge the reader to think deeply and broadly about the common threads which bind the broad field of outdoor leisure together. The experiences explored in this book range from suburban outdoors to wild places, surfing to mindful reflection, and trail walking to Nordic skiing, and encompass a broad spectrum of people.This book will appeal to outdoor scholars from a variety of contexts, including recreation, tourism, and adventure. It provides:·original and leading research across layers of meaning attributed to and drawn from leisure experiences in the outdoors;·value in theorising the notions of outdoor experiences;·a variety and scope of contexts and approaches for students to draw on when learning about the field of outdoor leisure.

Doctor Mandi Baker's research takes a special interest in organised outdoor experiences, youth, community development, employment and management practices, recreation and leisure. Her work explores the people skills, power relations and emotion work of everyday employment experiences through post-structural theory to offer fresh insights and innovative solutions to employability, leadership and education.

Professor Neil Carr is part of the Department of Tourism at the University of Otago and a former Editor of Annals of Leisure Research. His research focuses on understanding behaviour within tourism and leisure experiences, with a particular emphasis on children and families, sex, and animals. Since gaining his PhD from the University of Exeter he has worked at the University of Hertfordshire (UK), University of Queensland (Australia), and most recently the University of Otago (New Zealand).

Associate Professor Emma J Stewart is co-Head of the Department of Tourism, Sport & Society at Lincoln University, New Zealand. She is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, The Polar Journal, and Tourism in Marine Environments. Her research focuses on nature-based tourism; outdoor recreation experiences; environmental change and implications for communities, landscapes and the tourism sector. She has published over 50 peer reviewed journal articles and edited three books.