Carving Lines through Melting Lands: A Diffractive Engagement with Troubled and Troubling Relations of Alpine Skiing in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This study conceptualizes alpine skiing as a troubled and troubling leisure practice in the context of the Anthropocene. It employs a critical feminist new materialist lens and a diffractive methodology to unravel, critique, and undo the multifaceted more-than-human relations with snow and landscapes in alpine skiing. The study contends that alpine skiing is troubled by its capitalist, extractive, and exploitative relations with nature. Diffraction disrupts these relations by cutting through dualities and boundaries. Through diffractive vignettes of contaminating, collaborating, annihilating, and speculating, the findings illustrate the tensions and entanglement at the core of alpine skiing and how they matter for more-than-human relations. The study contributes by demonstrating how a diffractive engagement with leisure can be productive of troubling, caring, and thinking-with more-than-humans in hopeful futures beyond the Anthropocene.