Cristy Clark and John Page, ‘Swimming against the tide: Outdoor water, a relational turn, and prefiguring a future past’, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment (forthcoming) PREPRINT DOI: 10.26180/34804602
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: PREPRINT (Not final version): Swimming in the outdoors, as both physical practice and metaphysical idea, is a resurgent phenomenon in many parts of the globe. In this fraught moment of climate anxiety, to swim in cool, clean, outdoor waters is to participate in a quiet revolution, a ‘ground-up’, place-based, deeply relational movement often overlooked amidst the headlines of legal personhood and rights of nature. In observing this global ‘quiet revolution’, this article focuses on an exploration of the growing practice of ‘wild’ or outdoor swimming in England and Wales and the rise of its commensurate right to swim movement championed by the Outdoor Swimming Society (OSS). While the claims of the OSS may initially appear only to raise traditional contests around spatial access and real property boundaries (especially pronounced given the long history of enclosure and privatisation), we argue this framing hides a deeper relational turn, a growing dissatisfaction with ‘relations of severance’ from place and community. This relational turn, which we argue the right to swim movement exemplifies, represents a return to often forgotten or marginalised spatial values, where place and belonging matter, and where a legal future is prefigured in which ancient rights to swim in outdoor waters are re-enlivened and their legitimacy re-established.
Source: Monash University
DOI: 10.26180/34804602
Authors: Cristy Clark, John Page
Language: English
Topic: Environmental law and policy
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225401766