Review of Joseph Whitson. 2025. Marketing the wilderness: Outdoor recreation, Indigenous activism, and the battle over public lands
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.In Joseph Whitson's Marketing the Wilderness: Outdoor Recreation, Indigenous Activism, and the Battle over Public Lands, the author frames the creation of wilderness as “the outdoor recreation industry’s most successful marketing campaign” (p 3). The premise, no doubt provocative to some, comes into focus in his critical examination of the outdoor recreation industry's portrayal of wilderness, the colonial history from which those portrayals are produced, and its implications for Indigenous communities. Through a combination of social media analysis, digital ethnography, and historical research, Whitson delves into how marketing strategies have historically and contemporarily contributed to the marginalisation of Indigenous communities. Marketing the Wilderness unfolds over six chapters, beginning with a contextualisation of the political, social, and environmental exigencies for this project, including a historical analysis of the systems at work in outdoor recreation marketing. This is followed by various applications of his framework toward contemporary conflicts over land and digital tropes often deployed by the outdoor recreation industry.
Source: Journal of Political Ecology
DOI: 10.2458/jpe.10006
Author: Kyle Boggs
Institution: Boise State University
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4414645358
FWCI:
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