Conferences: Wellbeing and outdoor swimming

A few weeks ago, I shared my reflections from my source to sea walk at The Emerging and New Researchers in the Geographies of Health & Impairment (ENRGHI) Blue Bodies conference. This conference explored wellbeing in blue spaces and was a fantastic opportunity to connect with other researchers exploring watery spaces in their work.

Together with a fellow PhD researcher, Nikki Paterson, our talk explored themes of wellbeing, pollution, and entanglement in rivers that are more than simply blue, but often green, red and brown. Nikki's research works with outdoor swimmers in Yorkshire, including those who swim in the Rivers Wharfe and Derwent. We wove together reflections from our fieldwork to challenge the focus on 'blue' spaces in academic research, to argue for an expansive conceptualisation of more-than-human wellbeing that includes both human and planetary health, and to think through future collaborations between our projects and across our rivers.

As explored in the wonderful work of Dr Rebecca Olive (2022), 'swimming is not conceptual or metaphorical - it is a set of relations to ourselves and to what else is there.' Have a think next time you swim. What relations are you creating when you swim outdoors? Who and what are you connecting with - an otter, a seal, duck mites, sewage? It is these relations that can make us well (and sick) when we swim outdoors, relations that are at the heart of our experiences and ones that River Thames Reflections is exploring with swimmers along the Thames.