Understanding Blue Spaces: Sport, Bodies, Wellbeing, and the Sea

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue on ‘Understanding Blue Spaces’ which examines relationships between blue spaces, sport, physical activity, and wellbeing. The articles progress conversations across humanities, social sciences and inter-disciplinary areas of research on diverse sporting practices, that span local to trans-national contexts. This collection offers new insights into politics, possibilities, and problems of the role of blue spaces in our wellbeing—individually, socially, and ecologically. In addition to outlining the 10 articles in the SI, which include ocean swimming, surfing, sailing/yachting, and waka ama paddling, we contextualize this work, discussing key thematic areas both across these papers, and in the wider interdisciplinary body of work on blue spaces, wellbeing, and sport. Specifically, we outline the role of physical activities and leisure practices in how we access, understand, experience, and develop relationships to seas and oceans, as well as to self, places and communities of human and non-human others. We also discuss the ways in which particular bodies, individuals, and communities (human and more-than-human) are marginalized or excluded, and the need for understanding concepts such as wellbeing, place, and self beyond dominant European traditions. This SI highlights how localised experiences of blue spaces can be, while emphasising the need to recognize diverse cultural, economic, geographic, sociodemographic, and political factors that contribute to a disconnect with, or exclusion from blue spaces, impacting who can use blue spaces, how they can be used, how they can be researched, and how power is reproduced and contested.

Coastal Communities, Leisure and Wellbeing: Advancing a Trans-Disciplinary Agenda for Understanding Ocean-Human Relationships in Aotearoa New Zealand

“…While the COVID-induced lockdown circumstances were exceptional, they help amplify and highlight the deeply affective ‘everyday’ experiences of recreational surfers’ practices and how they influence people’s sense of wellbeing, collective identities, and forms of belonging and exclusion [ 33 , 34 ]. This unusual time-period has emphasised the socio-cultural relationships, experiences, and meanings that surfers bestow on their experiences of oceanic blue spaces, in diverse local and national contexts [ 33 , 34 , 63 ].…”

“…These benefits develop from both individual and community experiences and relationships [ 58 ] and may arise from immersion or simply visual embrace of the sea [ 37 , 58 ]. This growing body of work has illustrated the different ways in which coastal spaces can foster physical and emotional health and wellbeing across diverse groups, from those who watch, listen, and smell from the shore, to full-immersion activities such as surfing and swimming [ 56 , 59 , 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 ].…”

“…Nonetheless, this body of work shows that such relationships are complex and context-specific, and that blue spaces can also bestow risk, trauma, fear, and disengagement impacting human wellbeing and more-than human relationships [ 31 , 63 ]. For example, for those who lack swimming proficiency, beaches can be places of fear and danger, an affective valence potentially exacerbated by the images used in safety campaigns.…”

“…For example, for those who lack swimming proficiency, beaches can be places of fear and danger, an affective valence potentially exacerbated by the images used in safety campaigns. Issues of safety include increasing waste, which is leading to our lives of “polluted leisure” [ 64 ], in which we swim, surf and paddle in the by-products of our consumption [ 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 ].…”

Environmental attunement in the health and physical education canon: emplaced connection to embodiment, community and ‘nature’

“…There is substantial scholarship on the relationships between health and the environment that examines individuals and communities participation in therapeutic landscapes (Bell et al, 2018;Wilson, 2003), green space, bluespace (Olive & Wheaton, 2020); eco-health (Charron, 2012) and wellness (Brymer et al, 2010). Largely this work is situated in medical sociology, health psychology and geography with links to environmental care stewardship.…”