The romance of risk: adventure’s incorporation in risk society

Abstract

Adventure has outgrown its use as a metaphor and motive for educational journeys into the cultural outdoors. Self-reliance cannot counter the mechanisation of everyday life. ‘Adventure’ is produced and serviced by the very people who felt its worth to their own individualisation and now advance its professionalisation for their own continued participation. Yet adventure workers are limited to enforcing societal risk-mitigation systems, rather than acknowledging that risk is a damaging principle for pedagogy. They must refuse to take responsibility for the lives of others as dictated by institutional rationalisation of the odds of unequal consequences. Educators have been a part of both freeing and fetishising ‘adventure’, but must now distance themselves from the activities that give ‘adventure’ a social status. The more important work for educators is to build a pedagogy of ecologies: of friction, energies, movement, connections and transitions to new relationships with the changing cultural outdoors.