‘All the places we were not supposed to go’: a case study of formative class and gender habitus in adventure climbing

This paper explores the origins of meaning in adventurous activities. Specifically, the paper reports on a study of 10 adventure climbers in the Scottish mountaineering community. The study explores how formative experiences have influenced engagement in adventure climbing. Work has been done on the phenomenology of adventure and how individuals interpret and find meaning in the activity—this paper goes a step further and asks where do these dispositions come from? Using Bourdieu’s ideas of field, habitus and forms of capital to frame these experiences in the wider social environment, early experiences are identified that, for the subjects of this study, provide a framework for their later adoption of the ‘adventure habitus’. Among these influences are mainstream education, adventure education in particular, as well as broader formative experiences relating to factors such as gender and class. In addition, the study suggests that accounts differ between males and females in terms of their attitudes and dispositions towards adventure. This may relate to their respective experiences as well as expanding opportunities for both males and females. However, while the ‘adventure field’ provides a context where women can develop transformative identities, these are nearly always subject to male validation.

Global citizenship education: a sociological critique

This paper considers the recent focus on citizenship within education by taking curricular reform within Scottish secondary schooling as a case study. In Scotland the Curriculum for Excellence reform places citizenship as one of four main capacities that pupils must work towards as part of their education. A central theme in this reform is the need for students to take a global perspective and work across different disciplines. In this model of citizenship education learners are enabled to develop their sense of citizenship identity in response to a fast-paced world of innovation and change. Citizenship is therefore linked to a futurist agenda, where the learner-citizen is positioned as an ongoing project, as something to be worked at or perhaps worked on. However, this kind of notion of agency is an expression of an ideological construction of the citizen as a flexible resource for society. Such citizens are active in the sense of being adaptive to change through utilizing intellectual skills but without a sense of identity grounded in one's commitments or reflexive engagement with different forms of understanding. The paper offers a critical assessment of this learner-citizen discourse as focusing on ratiocination rather than relational identity.