Swimming, confusion, and plenty of brews: Negotiating ambivalence within Windermere's fragile waters

Abstract

Windermere is a complex and contested freshwater site which encounters fluctuating social and environmental pressures. Swimmers at Windermere regularly practice across all four seasons while negotiating social concerns such as access, conflicting user groups, public health communications, and swim safety, alongside environmental complications including extreme weather, wastewater, run-off, plastic pollution, algal blooms, biosecurity, and climate change. Simultaneously, these entangled pressures generate ongoing adaptation, ambivalence, and avoidance within the swim communities. Furthermore, they disrupt individualised and inwardly focused understandings of ‘healthy’ outdoor swimming practices. In contribution to the special issue (on outdoor swimming), this article reflects on how outdoor swimming researchers may methodologically attend to these social and environmental complexities within contested lacustrine environments through an immersive 12-month wet ethnographic approach, combining ‘lake-hangouts’ and ‘swim-along interviews’ with different swimmers at Windermere. The article discusses how these relational in-situ approaches can continue to broaden inwardly focused understandings of ‘healthy’ outdoor swimming practices towards the wider social and environmental relations for both the participants and researcher. The article also highlights senses of ambivalence and ethical tension while negotiating conflicting concerns of ill-health, in and out of Windermere's fragile waters.